


mahabharata tumblr fills

by toujours_nigel



Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2019-07-30 00:21:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16275353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: headcanon, au, and various not-fic, gathered here so i don't lose them to tumblr.





	1. Chapter 1

**Parashurama kills Bhishma in the fight Amba arranges**

  1. Amba watches him die, kneels beside his cooling body and then holds him in his arms and weeps, howls, uncaring that the barbs of the arrows are stinging her skin and, as she holds him closer, that their shafts are bending, breaking against her body. Five years in ascetic study, two bringing Parashurama to the field of battle, and she has never wept for the life she left behind, the life she was sure she could regain. But nobody will marry the princess who had Bhishma hunted; she would not marry any man who sought her hand. Her life is as surely finished as his.
  2. She goes to her sisters, her sisters’ husband who might have been her own. She makes a present of Bhishma’s weapons, the armour she stripped from his corpse, his ashes to be given to Ganga and his mother’s immortal keeping.   
“Stay,” Ambika says. “We have no quarrel with you.” Her husband nods, his hands still curled around the brass pot of his brother’s remains. Even Queen Satyavati signs assent.  
Amba stays. In time the blood on her soul transmutes to glory. She is her sisters’ champion, who no man dares gainsay.  
In time she goes to Vyasa’s bed in her sisters’ stead, brings forth heroes.
  3. Salva marries her, puts his perfumed princess away and takes her hands, leads her around the sacred fire, protests that he has missed her. He trembles when she makes love to him, flinches when she touches him without warning. Yet if he is a pitiful thing, the bride he took in her stead is worthy of having taken her place, an eager disciple in battlefield and bed. They raise daughters who can fight their own battles, sons who serve joyously as their sisters’ champions.
  4. She goes to her nanihal in Panchal, where they do not pluck weapons from the hands of their daughters at ten or fifteen or twenty. The astra-guru there tells her she has a good eye and might as well stay, her mother’s father fits her in gleaming armour and offers her the full stables to choose from. Her grandmother brushes them away and brings her into the palace, stands over her when she bathes and eats and sleeps and comes back to some semblance of life. She has uncles in Panchal she can hardly remember, aunts she has never seen, young cousins who cling to her unafraid. The oldest, son of her uncle Prishata, comes laughing into her lap and says, “I am Drupad.”
  5. She goes home to Kashi where her mother dunks her in four different bathing-pools of milk and fragrant water, her father anoints her with holy oil, and her aunt embraces her and weeps in her hair. They call her the saviour of their kingdom, the avenger of wrongs, the healer of old wounds. She is not the first woman to have fallen prey to Bhishma’s blind arrogance, she is merely the first who fought back.



* * *

  


** Bhima is actually killed by Duryodhana and his poisoned kheer. **

 

  1. Kunti sends a letter home, not to Kuntibhoj but to the father who had so long ago given her to his friend. The answering Yadava contingent that arrives is full to the brim with energetic young men with heartbreaking smiles: Balaram slow and steady, never visible without the twins hanging off him; Krishna a charming whirlwind talking dharma with Yudhishtir and holding Arjuna close in the crook of one arm. It is only natural that Pritha goes home with her nephews, and a relief, despite protestations from the Kurus that they will be missed, that the boys’ inheritance will be kept safe for them.
  2. There is no Dronacharya for the boys, no reason for an enmity with Drupad, no repeated soujourn to the forests escaping death. This is all to the well, since there is no man among them to tempt a Rakshashi’s heart, and Hidimbi is herself fond of human flesh. Instead they grow up in Mathura, then Dwaraka, the sprawling Yadava palaces with their lack of hierarchy and glorious plenty of quarrels. Yudhishtir lends his mind to the trouble over the Syamantak gem, and while Satyabhama still weds Krishna, Jambavati stays in her mountain fastness.
  3. Drupad still has many sons with the many women of his Inner Palace, loves them with a benevolent negligence, promotes them to princedoms as they prove themselves valiant, wise. He is kinder in this life, his kingdom vaster. His queen gives him a child who becomes his Crown Prince, the Peacock of Panchal, glorious with undying lotuses on his breast. His only daughter is one of a set, twins born to a junior wife, darkly beautiful like the rich soil of Panchal, its deep forests. Daughter-starved, his queen takes this child and raises her as well, Crown-Princess Panchali.
  4. They never go back. The Yadavas are a large clan, happy to have their sharpest daughter home, happier still to embrace her sons. When Kuntibhoj dies they crown Arjun in his place, and in his reign Kuntipura opens up and begins a slow climb towards glory. In the time of his grandson’s grandsons they still remember the rule of Partha and Panchali, the conquests made, the palaces built, the coffers filled with gold, the might of Panchal thrown behind their shields. By then, they have forgotten Yudhishtir, who lived out his life a nobleman of the Yadavas, often drunk, always shrewd, usually found haunting the gambling halls.
  5. They go back, Yudhishtira at the head of the Yadava noblemen, Arjuna leading the Panchala army. They have had Krishna’s voice in their counsels for fifteen years, the disciplined violence of the Panchal siblings at their aid for five, the guilt of Bhima’s death forever in their hearts. They offer no terms of conciliation in court, no quarter or mercy in battle. Yudhishtira is much sooner king of an empire of skulls, ghosts, widows wailing.



 

* * *

**Satyavati doesn't marry Shantanu, for whatever reason.**

  1. Shantanu dies. Not soon, but lonely. He was never the sort of king who made administration his life, but he gives it fewer hours every day, till his ministers are glad to see him go into Vanaprastha, by the Ganga where he met the Crown-Prince’s mother so long ago.
  2. Devavrat takes the throne. In this he is never Bhishma, and his death is in other hands than his own. He leaves a wife behind, two sons, one daughter, an alliance with Kashi that lasts through the life of his sons’ grandchildren.
  3. When the three princesses of Kashi are of an age to marry, their aunt’s sons take great joy in mocking all possible suitors, while her husband laughs and promises them revenge in due time.
  4. His grandsons are a great joy to his heart; skilled and learned and loving. He does not live to see them become men, marry and have their own households, but his is not a long-lived clan.
  5. Satyavati has glorious sons, matched with Parashara, wedded as befits a Princess of Chedi, the god-touched daughter of an apsara. She finds what passes for love, but never a man who knows her perfectly.



 

 

* * *

**Virat dies in the Matsya war and Sudeshna becomes Regent for the kingdom.**

 

  1. There are no honours given to the Pandavas. The only reason Yudhishtira does not die is that the queen is too busy with her husband’s corpse. Susharma of Trigarta dies when she has a moment to think about it.
  2. Prince Uttar hurries into the women’s rooms with his arms full of the uttariya of vanquished heroes and his mother shakes him till his teeth rattle. She does not care that he is a hero. Better still, she does not believe that he is one.
  3. There is no marriage. The family is going into mourning, Sudeshna says, and if they weren’t she wouldn’t tie her children to those who killed her brother and his followers.
  4. There is no peace even with Hastinapura, her husband’s true killers. Matsya closes its borders and waits, prays.
  5. When Aswatthama slaughters his way through the Pandava camp at the end of the war, the light of the Kuru clan is extinguished. Vrishaketu, who hasn’t a drop of Kuru blood in him, and every drop of his father’s loyalty, who grew up with the Kauravas as doting uncles and the Pandavas as his enemies, Vrishaketu takes the Elephant Throne.



  


 

* * *

**3 things the Panchal siblings should feel guilty about but don’t**

 

They are all killers. Born to deal death or consecrated for the purpose, firewalkers, bloodspillers. They are the weapons Drupad has spent his life honing, pointed at the throats of Hastinapura and the men who made her great. They know that their father loves them first as the instruments of vengeance, but it is his blood in them, his hands picking them up after every fall, his voice whispering in their ears, his mind moulding them. 

Here is Shikhandi, fine as a god in his armour, wedding the wife his sword won him, without a thought to her dashed dreams. Here he is again, a difficult handful of days later, sending courtesans sated to his father-in-law and shutting himself away with Uma to prove his manhood upon her.

Here is Krishna, named for the way her smile can bring people to their knees, smiling still and refusing the best archer a chance to prove his merit, turning an open competition at her whim into one closed against him for the shadowed birth no act of valour can illuminate in her lotus eyes.

Here is Dhrishtadyumna, thought the quietest of them, the one easiest under the weight of his prophecies, coming quietly up behind an old man who thinks his son is dead, who thinks himself his father’s friend, his teacher. Here he is, taking the venerable head in his hands, and twisting.

 

* * *

**3 women who helped other women that no one ever knew about**

Someone helps Pritha birth her child, the first one, the one born in and out of pain. Many hands hold her, brush sweat-soaked hair from her forehead, coax her thighs apart and coax her into drinking cooling juices. Many mouths veiled to hide how many know her secret speak words of wonder over her son’s golden frame. Some woman whose name she never knows presses a milk-spilling breast to his hungry mouth; there are always children in the palace, always women gravid or nursing. One sure pair of hands guide her in darkness to the riverbank, and help her set him afloat.

Kunti is many things but she is not kind. She learnt early where kindness led: a room with all its windows muffled, veiled women, holding her down, a son she never managed to feed. She is gracious as befits the Empress of Hastinapura, even to Madri who has both their shares of their husband’s love. Later she is scrupulous in refusing charity, in taking more than is her due from the coffers of Hastinapura, the throne that is being held for the son everyone thinks is her first-born. Vrishali the young queen of Anga, with child the first time, terrified that every step will lead to a fall, no competition in looks or wits to Duryodhan’s queen or Yudhishtira’s, finds her a boon from some careful god, the sure hand at her elbow, the certain voice detailing difficult pregnancies carefully survived, sending her fruit from her own gardens.  
  
The Inner Palaces of Hastinapura run in their own time, with little regard for the fights and alliances of the Outer Court. Barred from the Gaming Halls they hear of Draupadi from maids fleeing through the gardens or hiding in the temple. Dushala runs for her mother, Bhanumati for quill and parchment, and Vrishali of Anga, a charioteer’s daughter and their fastest rider, for the stables to take news to Subhadra in Indraprastha. In the Gaming Hall her husband boasts of how he might extinguish the flame in Panchali’s eyes.

 

* * *

 **Krishna and Draupadi**

  * _their **first**  impression of each other_  
She’s six when they meet, still one of Drupad’s half-acknowledged children, and he’s run away from his own horror at the birth of his baby sister. She remembers him better than he remembers her: a dark man always at her brother’s elbow, talking, taking away from the few hours Shikhandi finds every week for his crowd of younger siblings. He remembers the girl who snatched the peacock feather from his hair, but only as a blur dancing away across the courtyard, a streak of red like living flame.  
  

  * _the **next**  universe over: an alternative universe where their roles are reversed somehow_  
“And this is the boy who will bring about the death of my brother’s enemies?”  
“There was a prophecy, Samragni.”  
Panchali, who has lived through more prophecies than most sages even hear, smiles her sharpest smile. “Then we’ll just have to nudge it along.”  
  

  * _the **best**  gift one gave the other_  
Each other, and a ferocious love burning through any other entanglements.  
  

  * _the **worst**  memory one has of the other_  
When he finds them, after, in the first days of the Vanavas, she screams at him. That is as things often are between them, as natural as sneaking food from her plate or reassuring her the children are well. But then she weeps in his arms, and he could kill the world to dam her tears.  
  

  * _their **last**  fight/argument/disagreement_  
He thinks she should stop being furious with Arjuna. She thinks masterminding darling innocent Subhadra into marrying her husband was quite enough interference, thank you and good-bye. (None of the arguments about Abhimanyu’s upbringing count, no really, because they’re just offering advice.)



 

* * *

**Bhishma & Satyavati**

 

  * _their **first**  impression of each other: _  
They don’t get on, circling each other in the public courts with the wariness of cats locked into a room, he trying to reconcile nobility of character with the insecurity of a child too often abandoned, she trying to marry compassion with a need for power and safety. Where Devavrat tries kindness, she snarls, where Satyavati attempts hospitality he finds an insult.  
  

  * _the **next**  universe over: an alternative universe where their roles are reversed somehow:_   
“I came from the river,” the young hunter says, and Princess Yojanagandha, her aunt’s heir, crown princess of Chedi draws back in terror. He is her age, and there had been a boy her aunt had left behind with the fisherman, as too much trouble to raise with her own brother dead.  
But he says, “My mother dallied with the King of Hastinapura, and found him not to her taste.”  
It is no better. He is still in her aunt’s bed, still threatening to fill her lap with daughters with a closer claim to the throne.  
  

  * _the **best**  gift one gave the other_  
His brothers are a gift she gives his father, his kingdom is a gift he gives them. All they have for each other is honesty, sharp as a swift sword and soothing as sandalwood paste.  
  

  * _the **worst**  memory one has of the other_  
On the riverbank after the old king has gone Satyavati sees a boy perhaps a year older than her, perhaps born within days of her first breath. A boy with the river in his eyes, and with her blood singing out to his.  
He folds his hands and bows his head and says, “Mother.”  
  

  * _their **last**  fight/argument/disagreement_  
She goes into the forest with the son who has never brought her to tears since she brought him into the world. She leaves the kingdom, she leaves him holding the pieces of it.  
When he sees Arjuna, ten and tremulous and trying to be brave, he is almost grateful for all the palaces she has left bare in his heart for the boy to romp through.



 

* * *

  **Bhishma**

**16\. Anger headcanon**

Bhishma is always angry. He hides it well, but he is. You might be too, if you made over your birthright to someone else and they ruined it for three generations while you had to watch.

**17. **Soft spot headcanon****

Arjuna. The boy showed up all of ten going on eleven and every bit of the heart he’d been letting go to stone sprang back into life.

**20**.  **Relationship with/thoughts on his parents headcanon**

He adores his mother, the one being so immeasurably old he can always seek a child’s comfort. Shantanu he pretends is a vague memory by the time he passes; his father lived too intensely to live long. Satyavati, his mother who is barely his own age he loved like a comrade, who put her shoulders to the wheel of state and got her hands dirty when he wouldn’t.

 

* * *

 

**Satyavati**

**9\. General physical contact headcanon**

Only doesn’t hate it when she’s the one initiating, and doesn’t much like to initiate. Her sons were never touch-starved, but that’s because hugs were the responsibility of their nannies and occasionally Bhishma.

**11\. Wardrobe headcanon**

A lot of blues and silvers and pearls, even in her ornamentation. Part of it is that she really likes the colours, but mostly she’s keeping her own mythology front and center.

**18\. Favorite possession headcanon**

Hastinapura. It ought to be, with all the effort she put into it.

 

* * *

 

**Amba**

**4**.  **Driving headcanon**

That’s what charioteers are for. She doesn’t even like horses.

**7\. Kissing headcanon**

Kissless virgin, as one of my friends used to call herself. A lot from her baby sisters and parents, but nothing romantic; she may not have minded, but Shalva had a deep and bright sense of honour and its requirements.

**10\. Physical appearance headcanon**

Like a flame, with gold at her wrists and ankles and waist and throat, and then in the ascetic orange of her vengeful years. Living fire climbing a bed of it.

 

* * *

 

**Krishna**

**3\. Sleeping headcanon**

Like a log or a baby. But he always wakes the moment he’s called.

**12\. Jewelry headcanon**

He has a *lot* of it, and is fond of it as it enhances his overall appearance. But it’s only the Samantaka gem that is dear to him in itself.

**16\. Anger headcanon**

Krishna is not usually visibly angry. He does make a show of it as and when needed.

**17\. Soft spot headcanon**

The Panchalas. He’s ruthless with even Subhadra in a way he can’t bring himself to be with Draupadi. He uses them, of course he uses them, but he sometimes feels a twinge of regret.  
Also Arjuna, but that is too tangled up in his own need for love.

 

* * *

 

**Panchala Siblings**

**10\. Physical appearance headcanon**

They’re all within a handspan of each other, which means Draupadi is tall, Dhrishtadyumna is on the short side of average, and Shikhandi would be tall for a woman but is in fact quite short. All built, though Dhrishtadyumna is less on the lean side than the others. An absolute mass of hair, and large eyes and all rather uncannily similar looking, down to the archery calluses on Shikhandi and Dhri

  
**13\. Nickname headcanon**

So many nicknames that I am not fluent enough in Sanskrit to actually think up, but largely on the order of tiny baby little my-girl etc.

 

**18\. Favorite possession headcanon**

For Shikhandi his undying garland and, uh, his dick, honestly.

For Dhrishtadyumna I think some small and relatively trivial token from his sister before he leaves for training with Drona.

For Draupadi the akshaya patra, because she is nothing if not brutally practical.

**20**.  **Relationship with/thoughts on Krishna headcanon**

Krishna is actually the most divisive person they’re around. Shikhandi and Draupadi adore him, if not unconditionally. Dhrishtadyumna, who is somewhat less susceptible to the charm routine, understands that he’s a good ally and even understands why his siblings think the world of him, but privately finds him more unnerving than comforting.

* * *

**Shikhandi: three stories he loved and a song he learned**

  1. When he is still a princess and the blessed garland blooms too high for him to reach, his nurse tells him of Parvati who turned ascetic for love of Mahadev and won his heart and hand. It is meant to teach him the value of a good husband, but conveys only the efficacy of perseverance.
  2. Every Chandravamshi child grows up knowing the story of their founder Ila, who was both a man and a woman, and their husband Budha, the son of Chandra, but few loved it as did the young prince Shikhandi, strutting about Kampilya in his armour of shining bronze, the undying lotus garland fragrant on his breast.
  3. The story of the garland and its giver, which in Panchala is a story told to the glory of Kashi’s abandoned princess and the shame of Hastinapura’s ascetic prince. At ten, at twelve Shikhandi can already weave his way through thick forest to the clearing where Amba breathed her fiery last, is found sleeping on his vagabond days with his head pillowed on a protruding root.



&

  1. Shikhandi’s voice is a peacock’s indeed, strident and unmusical. He learns the words to all the songs his little sister sings and supplies them when her tongue fails to marry lyrics and melody.



 

* * *

**Bhishma, three random acts of kindness and a thoughtless act of cruelty.**

  1. Vichitravirya is afraid of horses and determined to best the fear in boyish fashion by spending days trying and failing to catch at the halter of the stallions that pull his brother’s war-chariot. A day witnessing the foaling his mother’s calmest mare, and a week spent hand-raising the dappled colt does far better.
  2. He joins his voice to Vyasa’s when the sage asks for a year, a month, a week’s respite before he visits the princesses. To his eyes Vyasa is well-made, comely in his rags and ashes, but young men are often afraid, and young women oftener.
  3. He teaches Dhritarashtra how to grapple with an enemy when one is close enough for touch to suffice, and then finds others to teach him better.



&

  1. “Send food to the Gandhara entourage,” he says on the third day. “But every day a little less.”



 

* * *

**3 lives Amba destroyed and one she saved**

  * Ambalika, youngest and most sheltered, too afraid to screw her eyes shut in bed with a man she cannot bear, bearing a son who burns up in glory, leaves her grandsons she’s never allowed to raise.
  * Ambika, who has always had her sister to hide behind, who tries to put other bodies between her and danger, who fails and brings forth a son shut away in darkness for her sin of simple terror.
  * Amba lights her own life up like a torch dipped in pitch, looking for vengeance, climbing a pyre in search of a better body when no bodies are offered up to her quest, her need for justice.  
  

  * Shikhandi, who rises to glory with a divine garland about his neck, and a doting father who allows any liberty to the son who will bring down the greatest warrior in the world.




	2. Chapter 2

**Draupadi and Vrishali, swapping places**

  * Arjuna wins the princess, golden fair as sandalwood split for the yajna: Yajnaseni in truth, and they bear her home to their cottage. She remains quiet when they speak of her as of alms, and when they share her out, and when her brothers come and learn who her husbands truly are.  
It is only when talk turns to routines and regulations that she says, “No. If I find pleasure in a man’s bed or bear him a child, my body shall wear the signs as my mind shall. And no, I shall be bound by no rules that let a man into my bed; any wife may refuse her husband in rage or fear or grief. Am I to be treated worse?”  
When they protest or Yudhishtir attempts explanation, she says, “These are my terms. My brothers await me, and many men are wed to wives they scarcely see. If I am your wife, I am your ardhangini, not your servant to come as I am bid.”  
  

  * Karna goes hunting in the untended forests of Anga after they return from Kampilya disappointed, and when next he comes to court in Hastinapura he has a wife with him, a slip of a girl half his age, younger than Bhanumati, younger even than Dushhala, darkly pretty like a lamp-lit night: Krishna.  
“In truth she is,” says Duryodhana, congratulates his friend on his wedding and very carefully refuses to pry.  
His brothers follow where led, first for their brother, and then for Vasusena, and when less than a year has rolled past, for respect of Krishna herself, who rules Anga with care and brings her questions to the Queen Gandhari, who cajoles Princess Bhanumati out of her fits of melancholy, who sits at Pitamaha Bhishma’s feet and drinks up all his knowledge of statecraft.  
It scarcely matters where a suta’s wife was born.  
  

  * Sahadeva tells her of the year’s likely rainfall and the illnesses that might spring from fetid earth, careful always to keep it a matter of chance. Nakula takes her riding, gifts her a mare every name-day, a stallion when she lets him into her bed, teaches her to care for her own herd. Bhima teaches her the cuisines of every land where he has wandered and every city he has seen. He rejoices her heart with Panchalan food, eaten with greedy joy after the pleasures of love. But most she delights Yudhishtir’s heart, ready to learn his abstruse philosophy and as ready to counter him. She is never more Empress of Indraprastha than with the Emperor in her bed.  
“I know,” she tells Arjuna as he sets his greaves into his cuirass, checks the fletchings of his arrows, “that I am not who you thought you’d married. I hope you find her in your quests, but to call it exile is laughable.”  
  

  * Karna’s first child is a daughter and he hangs her with all the love in his heart, his princess, his dearest, his little girl who looks like her mother down to the curve of her determined mouth. Sons come in their own time, part-named for him and well-loved: Vrishasena two years after his sister, Susena and Surasena twins at whom their mother stares in bewilderment. Neither can say whether their families are given to twins.  
But first is Vasumati, in whose life he can trace how far he has risen: his father a charioteer, his daughter a princess’ playmate and a princess herself. He watches her with Lakshmanaa, braiding flowers into each other’s hair and dancing in the inner courts, he guides their hands on the hilts of daggers and helps them nock arrows on longbows, and he plans.  
She is sixteen, the year the Pandavas come to Hastinapura to play dice.  
  

  * Yajnaseni comes when called, the servant sent to summon her preceding her into the hall, and her own women scurrying after her: the Empress of Indraprastha in all her array, gleaming gold. The dull roar of drunken men in excited conversation stills and falls silent as she watches them: her husbands deprived of their jewels and the upper garment of free folk, their cousins triumphant.  
It is Dushhasana who first finds his voice. “How unfortunate that you deprived me of the pleasure of dragging you screaming through the halls, slave.”  
“But how fortunate, that I did not deprive your mother of the pleasure of my company, princeling. What would this... assembly have of me?”  
“We have you,” Duryodhana says, a child exultant. “Yudhishtira waged all his wealth, his brothers, himself, you, and lost!”  
“Yes,” Yajnaseni says, and bows over folded hands. What would the princes have, of Queen Gandhari’s Sairindhri?”



* * *

**Shakuni Gender Flip**

 

“Why, you are luck for us,” says Bhishma when he first meets them, the Princess Gandhari and Princess Shakuntala of Gandhar. “We have an ancestress Shakuntala, much famed.”

“I would hear stories of her,” she answers, automatic and polite. It is odd to be down on the plains, but it is only for a while, and she would not have dreamt of letting her sister make the journey alone.

 

She should have, she  _should_  have, she should never have come down from her mountains, from the clear Suvastu to the placid streams of the Ganga, into the plains of Aryavarta and her sister’s home from which they refuse to turn her loose.

“Do you not like it in the City of Elephants,” asks her sister’s younger brother-in-law, and when she hesitates on the verge of saying that she wants nothing more than to run home, he adds, “We could of course arrange a wedding for you, Princess, but your sister might be lonely.”

“I could not bear my sister’s loneliness,” she tells him, and sits up late in the night to abandon all hope of home, a husband, children. Better go without than go where Hastinapura guides her.

 

All that year and the next, while her sister swells drum-tight with all the children Hastinapura demands of her—all at once, like they know they cannot long count on cooperation—she learns the ways of this kingdom of strangers, its culture and cuisine, its history and the songs that reveal what history keeps hidden. She learns of all the queens that have ruled from the Elephant Throne or sat in veiled power behind it, mothers and sisters and the odd irrepressible daughter.

Hastinapura does not believe in keeping its women far from its courts and councils and, though she would exchange it all for her mountain fastnesses and its knots of women, she is glad to walk the streets, the markets, the homes of her sister’s new family. Nobody looks askance, at a woman raising her voice in the royal debates still led by Dowager Empress Satyavati and often moderated by the Queens Ambika and Ambalika, and those who look startled at a stranger’s opinion are soon soothed by the magic of her name.

Shakuntala, her namesake, who rose from a sage’s daughter to the Queen Mother of Bharatvarsha, whose glorious son gave his name to a clan and a kingdom that grew to vast to not crack apart.

 

She is ready, when her sister births her eldest son and he is laid into her hands in lieu of the hands of the many brothers they will never again see. She gives him to his father but briefly, and receives him again as Dhritarashtra fumbles his way to his wife and weeps into her embrace over his perfect son.

As the jackals howl and jackasses bray, she tells little Duryodhana, “I will see you crowned king, and I will burn this kingdom down.”

Dice is a game of chance only for those who cannot play it.

* * *

**Bhishma Gender Flip**

 

They name the girl Divyani after her ancestress, her river-mother oddly concerned, for one who has killed seven sons without flinching, without explanations. Santanu wonders what will happen to this child, but she grows from a day to a week to a month to a year, milking her wet-nurse’s teats dry, and slowly beginning to eat solid food, to babble and then talk, to pull herself up and totter along the walls.

When she is five, and a person, enchanting, Ganga comes into the nursery where Santanu is holding his daughter in his lap as she dozes and tells him, “I must go soon. Not this year, but next, when she is old enough to do without me.”

Santanu wants to protest and cling to his wife and explain that he cannot do without her, but he is more afraid of disturbing Divyani’s sleep, and after a kshan, sense prevails. He had promised to never question Ganga, he had held his tongue through the deaths of seven sons. “It is kind of you to warn me,” he says at last. “We will miss you when you leave.”

“Yes,” Ganga says, unhappy. “It’s inconvenient, these ties mortals have. Very well. On the day of her birth you may visit me where first we met on the banks of the river.”

 

It becomes an annual pilgrimage for father and daughter, Divyani first riding in front of Santanu, then pillion behind him for a resentful year, and slowly on her own horses, crashing into the turbulent waters and–always confident of welcome–into her mother’s arms.

Santanu, who has her every day of the year, waits with his own horse at a distance as mother and daughter converse. His own conversation with Ganga is more stilted every year, absence wearing down passion as dripping water a rock, his dead sons a chasm between them deepening annually.

He cannot wish that Divyani were a boy, when she fills his heart brimful with love, but he has no heirs to the throne, and his brother scarce enough to secure his own kingdom. Then she is sixteen, seventeen, and engaged to the younger prince of Kashi, and though he says nothing Santanu pictures her sons on his throne and is content.

 

Then she is nineteen and married, and Ganga rises up on the bathing ghats in Kashi, and Santanu’s horse lames itself and forces him to take assistance from the fisherwoman who ferries travellers across the waters. 

“I am happy for you,” Divyani protests at his wedding, and folds young Satyavati–some months younger than her new daughter–into an embrace.

At twenty, and again at twenty-five, she is with him on the banks of the river as her mother slips into the waters, with him still as his heart trips and starts, trips and stops again, with him as light slips from his eyes and the life from his body.

“You must take care of your brothers,” he tells her as she rubs his hands, thumps his chest, offers to run or ride back to their entourage camped an hour’s ride away. “Hush. I have little time. Your brothers are young and Satyavati untrained in our ways. You must help them, raise them with any children you have.”

“I will,” she says, and even with dimming sight he can see the tears streaming from her eyes. “I will, Father, but you cannot leave me yet.”

She is the best of children, he thinks, and tells her so, raising a hand with difficulty and placing it on her head. “You have shared my death with me, O most dutiful of daughter. May your own come only when you call it.”

In the corner of his eye he can see the bulk of Yamaraja, and with the last of his vision the divine nod that sets the seal on his blessing.

* * *

**Arjuna and Draupadi Swap Places**

 

 

  * “I have had my fill of sons,” Pandu tells Pritha when Bhimsena is a toddler, crushing rocks and uprooting saplings. “I would have a daughter from you, one who has every scrap of your beauty and your wisdom, and every quality, besides, that you can wish for her.”  
Kunti prays that night to Agni, nourishing, destroying, all-consuming, the god of deaths and rebirths, grass springing from ash. Her daughter would always find her way to safety, to triumph, if she had to burn her way through an army for it.  
The child she births is dark like ash ploughed into fertile soil, blue like the lowest flame. Pandu takes her carefully into one cradling arm, and calls her “Archana, the blessing of our ancestresses.”  
  

  * ****“Two sons, full-grown, sprang from the flames of the putreshti yajna,” the Brahmin in Ekchakra Nagari tells the widow who has sought shelter in his home for herself and her five children. “One as bright as the tallest of flames, the other as dark as embers. They were born to avenge their father for the wrongs done him by Dronacharya.”  
If the widow’s four sons and daughter shuffle a little and roll eyes at each other, he puts it down to the impudence of the young, or simple disbelief. It is difficult, of course, to think of people born of flame, and naysayers are comparing the new princes to two of the king’s sons from minor wives, but his uncle’s sister-in-law’s cousin’s brother was one of the Brahmins officiating at the yajna, so his information is accurate.  
“Too much to hope Drupad’ll be feeling charitable just because it’s his sons’ coronation,” Yudhishtira says into the darkling night, awake even though it’s not his turn to watch.  
“Might let these kids test their mettle on us,” Sahadeva agrees. “Still, it might be fun.”  
  

  * “Acharya Drona sought his luck in Magadha,” says the mendicant to the Yadava princes and their cousins from Indraprastha. “Who in this world does not know of the ruthlessness of Magadha. I have with me the youngest children of King Drupada, who has gone to meet his ancestors: Dhrishtadyumna and Krishnaa.”  
“And his eldest son, in your own skin,” Vasudeva points out, laughing. “You are terrible at disguise, O Peacock of Kampilya, and I am offended you attempted it. Does Dwaraka not know of the cruelties of Jarasandha?”  
“I seek nothing for myself,” Shikhandi insists. “Your cousins are kin to Bhishma, and my vow would rest heavy on their shoulders. But my siblings have done you no harm, nor anybody else. They are young, yet, not even consecrated prince and princess of Panchal, and now they never will be.”  
“We do not rule in Dwaraka,” Arjuna says, “even our cousin does not. If the Princes of the Yadavas so wish, they will take your siblings into their care and you into their company. But I believe,” and here he looks to his elders for affirmation, “that our mother would be pleased to meet you, one and all.”  
Indeed there is a smile on the face of Pritha–erstwhile Queen of Hastinapura and always a Princess of the Yadavas–when she tells hers sons and nephews to divide among themselves whatever prize they have hunted down. It crumbles when she emerges from her palace to see her boys surrounding three young mendicants, all anxious beneath sunburn and ash, all looking to her for guidance.  
  

  * ‘No,” Shikhandi says, “try again.”  
It is strange to watch his sister’s glare issuing from a subtly different face: the forehead longer, the eyes deeper-set, the jaw more prominent, the mouth a little thinner. The change has not been towards Dhrishtadyumna, who has never looked very like his twin save in the family characteristics, or even towards Shikhandi. Parshati still looks like herself, simply drawn with a boldern stroke pressing down heavier on wax. It is not the face at any rate that will run them into trouble, it’s the extra scrap of height, the narrower hips, broader shoulders, larger hands: the new impossiblity of the changed body.  
“Again,” he says while his youngest sibling glares at him. “We’re going to run this drill till you can do it in your sleep, and then we will learn five more. One month will be scarcely enough time, if you plan on fooling strangers. Why can you not be a master of song instead, or help Bihmsena in the kitchen?”  
  

  * ****Draupadi dies and her husband, walking away from her corpse, says, “She loved us all equally, but she had too much confidence in her mind and her abilities, even her ability to make us love her.”



* * *

**Arjuna doesn't kill Jayadratha in time**

 

  * The fourteenth day of battle ends with the death of Arjuna, the third Pandava, who ends his life by mounting his son’s pyre and carrying him to heaven in his arms as he might have soothed a nightmare when Abhimanyu was an infant.  
The fifteenth day begins with Krishna’s Garudadhwaj rath among the Pandava host, Krishna the warrior and Niyati holding the reins.  
  

  * The sun sets, truly sets, and Jayadratha comes out from his hiding-place and the moment of sunset, darkness drawing in, feels longer than anything in Arjuna’s life.  
Then the Sudarshana chakra spins out from Krishna’s hand and through the Kaurava celebrations and out over the Drishadvati river into which it drops a grisly load. When it comes back to Krishna it is glistening red.  
“Your vow,” Arjuna manages. “His  _father’s_.” He had been prepared to die killing Jayadratha, but thinking of Krishna’s death is enough to jolt him back to life.  
“Had loopholes a lion could leap through. Abhimanyu grew up in my home, in my arms, I’m all the father he has ever ever known, my sister’s son and yours. How could I have let his death go unavenged?”  
“I too swore a vow,” Arjuna reminds him, “and cannot break it.”  
“If you leave the war now, you cede victory to the Kauravas, and your son’s other killers go unpunished. Jayadratha is dead, now, and you and I have ever been one soul in two bodies. Will you make widows of your wives and a liar of me?”  
  

  * “You don’t get to die,” Draupadi tells him as he strips off his armour. “I don’t care for your vows, you swore one to me long ago, to keep me company seven lives. I am not done living this life, and I am not living it, Partha, without you.”  
“You have other husbands, Panchali,” he says, because they have always known how best to hurt each other.  
“I chose you,” she says, and stops his hands as they unbuckle his cuirass, kisses his bruised knuckles. “I chose only you. We have a son, if you will not live for me. Subhadra has only you. You have brothers who love you, you have a grandson yet to see daylight who will never know his father. Live, Partha. You must live.”  
“He will be so afraid,” Arjuna says, and tears spring finally from his eyes. “He was afraid of fire when he was a child, I never knew it but Subhadra wrote to me of it. I knew so little of him and now he is dead, my son, my youngest. I was never a father to him.”  
“He was proud of you, as I am, as Srutakarma is, as all of us are. And fire… fire will not hurt him. He goes to the arms of his grandfathers, they will keep him safe till you can see him again. But Partha, you must live.”  
  

  * Jayadratha lives to see sunset, and then news comes to the Pandava encampment, where his brothers and wives are trying to dissuade Arjuna, that Jayadratha is dead, and then that Karna is dead with him.  
“Drunken brawling,” Bhimsena says when he has wrestled Arjuna away from honey and ghee and oil, and given him over to the terrifying care of his wives. “I am only relieved they did not take Duryodhana with them. The shards of bone, exploding, must have had quite a range.”  
“… yes,” says Krishna, and glides away to ensure Arjuna has access to nothing sharp, nothing poisonous, nothing dangerous.  
“He told me before the battle began that I could have five sons living after it ended,” Pritha says when her nephew finds her in a quieter moment, in the dead watches of the night. “Today I chose. It gave him the hero’s death he wanted.”  
“It was well done, aunt. But Duryodhana will turn on his family, have you taken thought of it?”  
  

  * The thirteenth day ends with the death of Abhimanyu, the fourteenth with his father’s. On the fifteenth day the war continues, with the Pandavas weakened and the Kauravas heartened.



* * *

**3 things Drona taught Drupad, and one thing Drupad taught Drona**

As the son of their preceptor, Drona is expected to act as somewhat of a go-between: too young to properly teach, too knowledgeable to truly be a student. Much of what he imparts to the princes in his father’s care is the daily wisdom of existing in the world without a pack of servants.

“That’s not how you light a fire,” Drona might say, taking tinder and flint from Drupad’s hands and demonstrating. “I showed you yesterday.”  
“Well, now show me again. No, not like that,” says Drupad. “Here, guide my hands.”

“You must tie your kill in the tree so high that the panthers will not get at it.”  
“What of the vultures?” Drupad might ask, brow furrowed and eyes squinting up at the sun.  
“There are no vultures in this forest,” Drona replies, staring. “Did you think all animals live in all lands?”

“That is not how you cook rabbit,” Drona might say, and then, grudging, “You have skinned it better than I could.”  
“I know,” the prince says. “We usually cook them over stones set in fire, and not on sticks. You must teach me.”

“This is nothing you could ask of a wife,” says Drupad, “or of an equal. But I am a prince and you are not, and you are a Brahmin and I am not, so we are never equal though we are balanced and friends. So I thought, that I might teach you this.”  
At the moment Drona says something rudely impatient, because Drupad is on his knees in front of the fire with his curls limned and his eyes lit up and Drona keeps thinking he looks like a gandharva despite every attempt to be sensible. Shortly thereafter, the prince ducks his head into the Brahmin’s lap and Drona promptly forgets everything except the need to get deeper in Drupad’s mouth and its war with the need to avoid choking Drupad.

When next he sees Drupad on his knees, thirty years have sped past and the furious king looks nothing like that eager boy, except. Except for his eyes, and his skin flushed now with rage and then with lust, and how little revenge has sated Drona’s need for revenge, for Drupad.  
“You once told me that friendship is a thing between equals,” he tells Drupad, setting his index finger with its archer’s callus beneath the king’s chin and tipping his face up. “And now I am a king as you are, yet I am a Brahmin and you are not, so we are unequal still, and unbalanced.”  
“We shall not remain thus,” Drupad says, just as though his hands are not pinned behind his back, and Drona’s students guarding his palace and his sons.  
“We are unequal also in other ways. I have a single child, and you have nine that you have acknowledged and others littering this palace. Shall we be equal in that respect?”  
He can see in Drupad’s eyes the struggle to claim he cares nothing for his children compared to his pride. “No,” Drupad says, losing the struggle and closing his eyes. “We are unequal. If I must call you my superior to save my children, so be it. You have conquered my land, you have conquered me. Any insult I offered you has been answered.”  
“Yes,” Drona says, and cups Drupad’s cheek with his free hand. “And once you told me there were things one could never ask of an equal. Do you remember?”

* * *

**Karnarjuna Place Swap**

 

  * The group of foresters huddle around the infant they found when the storm cleared, tucked miraculously unhurt in the angle of an uprooted tree and the ground.  
“Do you think he’s a royal child?” asks one, touching the meteoric iron of the boy’s bangles, his earcuffs. “I heard from Sudam who heard from Aja who heard from Chira that there’s a royal encampment on the next hill. Hastinapuris, they’d pay us well if it’s theirs.”  
“And what if it isn’t,” asks his aunt, “and instead one of your mad plans? You think they’ll thank us to come sell them a child we found on the ground?”  
“They’ll probably kill us,” ventures the youngest. “They might think we steal and sell children, or that we’re suggesting one of the queens abandoned a child.”  
“Maybe one of them did,” chimes in the oldest. “Maybe she had reason. Such a thunderstorm as we had yesterday, you think anyone was out in it with an infant without reason?”  
There’s a pause as they absorb it, and then the aunt says, “We’ll raise him as ours, call him Arjuna after the tree.”  
  

  * “What a pity,” says Prince Suyodhan to his eldest new cousin, “that you were not acknowledged as one of my uncle’s heirs, or you might have been King of Hastinapura some day soon.”  
Suyodhan isn’t precisely bad at this, and some day soon he might even be good, but at the moment he is fourteen and not come into his growth, and Vasusena Karna regards him with the lofty amusement of twenty.  
“It seems to me that in Hastinapura this often happens, that the eldest or best-suited for kingship is set aside. And you mistake the matter, little prince. King Pandu offered me recognition as his eldest son, when he met me with Yudhishtir an infant and you as yet unborn. But I am fond of freedom, and I would rather be prince of many kingdoms than tied to any throne.”  
  

  * Nobody can accuse Dronacharya of being without his prejudices. He doesn’t believe in letting lower castes get uppity, he’s deeply suspicious of Shudra kingdoms and Shudra princes, he doesn’t even like the princes mingling with the soldiers they will someday command.  
But he does appreciate quality. He may be seen whiling away his few leisure hours listening to Vidura, and–despite his actions against Ekalavya–the princes of Hastinapura are astonished to find him training the young woodsman Arjuna with an assiduity he rarely displays when teaching them.  
“He just came out of the forest one day,” Bheema tells his mother. “Like some gandharva who’d decided to explore mortal life. And now our guru likes him better even than Vasusena.”  
Vasusena grins when Pritha turns to him for affirmation, and adds, “I can hardly blame Acharya Drona, when I like Arjuna better myself.”  
  

  * “Oh let him fight,” Vasusena says, when the young challenger is stopped at the gates. “I am scarcely likely to come to any throne myself, and to do battle with the great only elevates us.”  
“We know nothing of his kin and clan,” Kripacharya blusters.  
“That didn’t seem to matter when Acharya was presenting him the brahmastra last year,” Duryodhana points out, always happy to form brief alliances with Karna when it suits him.  
All eyes look to Drona, who looks ill at ease and shifty. “It is an exhibition of skill,” he allows at last, “and nobody can deny the skills of Arjuna. But I will demand a gurudakshina if you seek to be known as my student.”  
Arjuna, forewarned by a concerned Karna and an anxious Yudhishtira in his first days of shadowing the princes, steps into the arena and bows over clasped hands. “Any fee that does not deprive me of the ability to display the skills I learned from you, I am willing to pay.”  
  

  * “Prince of Hastinaupra, Prince of the Yadavas, Suryaputra Karna,” the herald announces, and a minute later the hall is an explosion of sound, and a showering of lotus petals, and Vasusena hurriedly unslings his quiver into the care of one of the brothers crowding around him before it tangles in the garland the princess throws about his neck.  
The next morning… well, the next afternoon he tracks the characteristic  _thwock_  of archery to find Arjuna watching as Prince Dhrishtadyumna practices under his brother’s eagle eye.  
“I could have made that shot,” Arjuna says without glancing around, and then turns when Vasusena rests a hand on his elbow. “Do you think they might let me try, now it doesn’t involve the princess’ marriage?”



* * *

**Bhanumati and Vrishali, Hogwarts AU**

 

“But you’re a pureblood,” Vrishali hissed, separating Bhanumati out of her fellow first-years as they trooped into the Great Hall for breakfast. Ten in Hufflepuff this year, Bhanu the smallest of the lot.

“Clearly that’s not a disqualification,” Bhanu said, vaguely bewildered. “I need to have breakfast now, I have double Charms afterwards.”

If the other Slytherins were bewildered by a Hufflepuff student at their table, enough of them put it down to an early hallucination and the rest subsided when Duryodhan set his shoulder to Vrishali’s and glared right alongside her that nobody actually said anything. (This was both fortunate and not, because Vrishali could have done with a target that wasn’t baby Bhanu.)

“Look at it this way,” Duryo ventured. “She’s loyal. Evidently she’s loyal to you, right pipsqueak?”

“Right,” Bhanu said, immediately, because Bhanu liked agreeing with older kids. “Um. Who are you?”

“Duryodhan Chakravarti, Slytherin Prefect, Quidditch Beater, at your service,” he said, laying the charm on thick, and Bhanu giggled.

“At least it’s not Gryffindor, I suppose,” Vrishali relented. She didn’t want Bhanu to have a bad time at school.

“If she’d landed with my idiot twin cousins I’d have complained myself,” Duryo assured her. “Look, you’ve known each other since before school, you’ll be fine. Plenty of people get split up, look at the Panchals. Look at my cousins, if you must. There’s worse things than finding out your little tag-along is loyal.”

Bhanu glowered briefly, like being called a tag-along wasn’t her favourite thing, and accepted the bowl of honey Duryo pushed towards her, nudging it up against her plate.

“I suppose,” Vrishali said, and then glared up suspiciously. “You just want another excuse to talk to Karna!”

“He’s Head Boy,” Duryo protested. “Can you think of anyone better suited?“

* * *

 

**Kichak and Karna Swap Places**

 

  1. The charioteer’s new son has a temper. “Matches the stallions,” Bhimsena says often to uproarious laughter.  
“He has soft hands,” Nakula says, and nobody has ever gainsaid Nakula when it comes to horses.  
Besides, even Bhima rather likes the boy, whose overeager appetites match his own–for food and drink, violence and sex–too well not to earn sympathy.  
If he makes eyes at Draupadi, that is a crime of which the wide world is guilty.  
Then he sets his hands on Draupadi, and Bhima kills him as easy and remorseless as he would put down a dog that had run mad, a horse charging at its riders.  
  

  2. The brother of the Queen of Matsya is quiet and welcoming, as easy as his brother-in-law and hiding power under his skin. He debates Kanka in the Privy Council, has his steward present compliments to Vallala, smiles at Brihannala when he wanders into the dancing hall to tease Uttaraa, listens gravely to Granthika on the merits of one horse above another, and during a cattle-raid gains an injury throwing himself between Tantipala and danger. When Sairindhri is sent to tend to his wounds he treads his way through an expression of concern that his wife translates into a wistful desire to have visited Indraprastha whose staff they are now housing.  
It is to Brihannala that he goes as the year is turning, to press his suit and talk of love.  
“This is not,” Arjuna tells his wife, heated and horrified, “how I thought Urvashi meant me to learn my lesson. Oh, stop laughing,  _priye_.” 



* * *

**Yudhishtira and Duryodhana Swap Places**

 

  1. Yudhishtira is relieved that the path of dharma runs so straight and broad. A king’s son becomes king, and his own father has only ever been Regent, holding the throne for the next heir. The eldest son in the family becomes King, and Suyodhana is a full year older.  
  

  2. Yudhishtira wishes the path of dharma were not so crooked and full of traps for an unseasoned walker. A king’s son becomes king, and his own father was king, and his uncle though the elder only ever Regent. The eldest son in the family becomes King, and Suyodhana is a full year older.  
  

  3. Suyodhana says, “Mother, look what a bride our Arjuna has won with his valour,” and hands Draupadi forth as Pritha comes wondering out from her cottage. All too soon there will be Panchal to sit in counsel with, but it is good to see his mother pull his new sister into an embrace.  
  

  4. Suyodhana says, “I will gamble no further, I cannot wage my family,”   
overlapping with  
Yudhishtira saying, “This is only a friendly game, I would not take your lands.”  
  

  5. “You are my brother,” he tells Karna. “We are bound together, that remains as true as ever it was. I pray you, forget my delusions about the nature of our tie, and remember only its affection. Let me crown you again, but King of Hastinapura now, and Emperor in Indraprastha.”



* * *

**Kunti and Gandhari Swap Places**

 

She waits for a year after she knows, long enough that Yuyutsu is beginning to toddle and Gandhari swell with Pandu’s child, before she goes to her husband. Her husband is blind, her brother imprisoned, her fathers old. Pritha would scarcely be a woman of the Yadavas if she couldn’t measure out her worth down to the last chipped silver piece and patch of barren land.

“I will give you three sons,” she tells him. “You can choose their fathers if you wish, from among the gods. If you leave me the choice, I will not be unwise.”

Dhritarashtra, himself a child of an uncle’s body and another’s rearing, deliberates for a long moment, the length of ten heartbeats, and then says, “Yuyutsu has his sight, but that guarantees nothing. What will you have of me, O Queen, for this service to my family?”

“I will ask after I have given you a Prince to set on the throne. What god will you name as a father?”

 

The eldest of Hastinapura’s princes is born in the depths of monsoon, and the day the boy seems likely to survive the ordeal of birth Hastinapura’s Regent takes his wife’s hand in a white-knuckled grip and walks without other escort down to the house behind the stables where his charioteer lives with his wife and son, just turned seven.

Old enough to know the sightless king at sight and fall clattering into an obeisance. 

“Get up,” Pritha tells him sharply. “Bring me Adhirath’s wife.”

If she flinches when he runs away bawling for his mother, Dhritarashtra knows it only because they are still hand-clasped, and he makes enough a secret of his own weaknesses.

She doesn’t know whether Vasusena is happy to be taken from his caretakers and installed in the royal nursery. She was taken and at twenty-six has still not forgiven her fathers for a day twenty years in the past. He likes Yuyutsu, he likes the new prince, he asks to hold them.

“You may play with Yuyutsu now, if his mother allows it,” she tells him. “He sleeps in the room on Arjuna’s other side.”

“I’m their brother,” ventures the boy who has only ever known horses and warm hearths, his mother holding him tight and loving.

“You are my son, Yuyutsu is the king’s, Arjuna is ours. There will be two more in time.”

“They’re my little brothers,” Vasusena says with greater conviction, and squares his little shoulders. “I’m going to keep them safe.”

* * *

**AUs where one of the Pandavas (+ Karna) does not exist**

  1. Kunti still chooses Pandu, but in this world her love for him is unmixed with repugnance. In this world Duryodhan’s plans falter faster. In this world there are no secrets waiting to implode in the heart of Hastinapura. In this world, who is as sad as Adhirath and Radha?  
  

  2. This is a world where Duryodhan is the kindest of elder brothers, where he and Bhimsena are friends, where his generosity spills forth undammed with resentment. This is a world where Draupadi only marries Arjuna, and all hundred and five of them sing the bride home to the City of Elephants.  
  

  3. The Pandavas die in this world. They die in Varanavat, they die in the forest after escaping. They die of hunger, they die of exhaustion, they die because some beast or forest god chances upon them unarmed and asleep. They die before Hidimba, they die at the hands of Bakasura.  
  

  4. This is a world where Draupadi marries Karna, and finds the humiliation of being wedded to a suta fades away against the reality of her husband’s love and their wife’s laughter. This is a world where Panchal stands with Hastinapura and Duryodhan calls her his sharpest counsellor.  
  

  5. In this world, when the Pandavas sicken they never entirely recover, their god-touched bodies bearing them to health without aid. They survive Kurukshetra, but the wounds from those eighteen days fester and rot. The crown reverts to Dhritarashtra, Parikshit an infant on his lap.  
  

  6. Santanu blesses his eldest son with foreknowledge in this world, and Yudhishtira, already capable of seeing all sides of an argument, is paralysed by his gift. He chooses inaction at every turn, unable to make his own decisions and unable to confide in his brothers.



* * *

**Five secrets Dushala kept and one she revealed**

 

  1. Her mother and Shakuni Mama still speak to each other in the Gandhar tongue, and she understands them. The only daughter and quiet, she learns it as any child a language: by hearing it spoken. She is never too young to know that she cannot admit to her knowledge of it, when nothing else of Gandhar lingers around her mother save the name like a label around her neck. It becomes instead a window into a world of harsh consonants and rolling vowels and the lilt of a high whistling song calling her mother home to the highest mountains: a lost home, a lost family, a language lost in Hastinapura save in the secret speech of its last royals.  
And in the mind of a princess who can never run into the welcoming arms of her grandfather, her mother’s other brothers, who can only hold their polished bones in cupped palms.  
  

  2. She like Yudhishtir best, in the ramble of boys related closely, distantly, and not at all that run shrieking through the palaces and form the steadiest sound of her life. Around Yudhishtir she can hear herself think, and she picks up the habit of following him around, and only grows to like him more when he shortens his pace to hers instead of picking her up (Duryodhan, Dushasan, Bhima or Yuyutsu when they notice) or walking along oblivious (Arjun, any of the twins who are taller enough she has trouble matching strides: twins love each other best always). Yudhishtir respects that she is a person, even though she is younger, and a girl, and never as learned as he is, nor as full of stories.  
She hopes she would be as generous with them as he is, and with her time as Yuyutsu. They are both comfortingly quiet, though in Yudhishtir it is the stillness of the deer, and in Yuyutsu of the panther, crouching.  
  

  3. Yuyutsu ran away from home once. She thinks of it as happening when he was a child, but in truth only she was. Yuyutsu is older than her by a handful of years, older than even Duryodhan by a handful of months, but he’s not a prince and, lacking their uncle’s quiet brilliance, is not a minister, and to her he appears ageless, an unmarked contemporary. When she is sixteen and Duryodhan twenty-two and the Pandavas in Varanavat, Yuyutsu disappears for a month and nobody seems later to have noticed his absence.   
A month is not very much time, after all. One could scarcely even ride to Mathura and back again.  
  

  4. Her mother can foretell the future. Not as easily as the sages of whom she has heard, who live in many times at once, nor even with Sanjaya’s gifted fluency of other places rather than times. But her mother’s gift slips from a thorough understanding of people into a knowledge of the future, not often, nor always about great things. When she was younger she had thought it proof her mother was not nearly as strictly blindfolded as she seemed, when knowledge of some little mishap outraced even the most tattletale of nursemaids. Then she was married and it outsped royal couriers and the doubt steamed from her mind.  
  

  5. She prays for Jayadrath’s death. She never loves him well, even when they are wed a scant month and he is trying to charm her. But princesses marry rarely for love and those marriages rarely bring great happiness. If he leers or touches her too roughly, it is only infrequently, and only when he’s drunk and only, and only, and only.   
He comes to her chambers engorged with lust the day her brother tries to disrobe Panchali, and he forces her into bed, and she wishes him dead the next morning and every morning since, for fifteen years.  
She never hates Panchali as much as she does when she hears she might have been a happy widow sooner.



 

  1. Vrishali is pregnant, even though she has been married twenty-two years and last had a child ten years ago, when Dushala still had hope in her own marriage. They are not friends, but it is less impossible to speak to Vrishali than to Bhanumati. It is four months since the Pandavas left, and Vrishali is complaining to anyone willing that she’s forgotten the travails of the first trimester.  
“You are happy, with the child,” she asks when they have a moment together in her chambers, Bhanumati having been inevitably drawn into the work of managing her own sprawling household after promising she would spend the afternoon with them.  
“Of course, after all the work I had of convincing my husband,” she laughs. “Usually he’s eager as a bull in rut, but he’s had an ascetic turn since he saw the Empress stripped. He says he’s old enough to be thinking of vanaprastha, with our Vrishasena a grown man, but I think he’s afraid.”  
It is a strange thought, Karna afraid, and novel enough to bring her a little out of her own misery. “Afraid?”  
“He hadn’t known he wanted Panchali as he did, which goes to show you how oblivious men are. But he’s gentler than you’d think, Princess, unless you’ve seen him with children or women. Never a harsh word, never a hard hand… why, Princess, you’ve gone pale.”  
“Not all men were afraid of the lust they uncovered in themselves,” she tells Vrishali for the relief of saying it, and is immediately afraid again. “You mustn’t tell Bhanu.”  
She doesn’t. She tells Karna, who tells Duryodhan. She never goes home to Jayadrath again.



* * *

**Rukmini & Satyabhama & Jambavati**

Her husband falls in love again and again and again. He tells her on their wedding night that he’s promised to marry a slip of a girl, fresh from the tribes, half-grown and utterly unfit for Yadava political infighting. It falls to Satyabhama to manage her. 

In another two years in falls to Satyabhama again, to handle Vidarbhi Rukmini who is wild for Krishna and doesn’t care–perhaps cannot bear to think of–what others might think of her love for him. Jambavati is quieter then, but still no sort of ally in her work. 

She draws the line, however, when he tells her the 16,000 women they’ve just rescued from Narakasura are now his wives and therefore her little sisters: his lovers, perhaps once every ten years when he finds the time for amorous dalliances among his political conspiracies, but her responsibility forever.

“I was an only child,” she reminds him pleasantly. “I have had my fill of sisters. My lord is very kind, but this is a gift that doesn’t please the heart.”

“Perhaps,” Krishna says, eyes flicking rapidly from her face to her sword and back again, “it is time for Jambavati to take on some of the duties of the household.”

* * *

 **Karna-Krishna Hunger Games AU**

The pair from Dwaraka find him while he’s still hugging Dusshala’s body to his heart, sliding out of the shadows more stealthily than should be possible for people smothered in colour.

“Camouflage,” the boy says cheerfully, “doesn’t always have to be greys and browns and pretty little flowers. You’ve got to mix in.”

The girl, squatting down beside him, asks, “Is she your sister?”

“My friend’s,” Vasusena says. “But he’s only fourteen himself. I volunteered.”

“I volunteered for his,” she tells him. “Subhadra, she’s barely twelve.”

The boy says, “It’s a pattern this year. You’re the fifth pair, counting us, that is or should have been siblings. I wasn’t calculating for that.”

“Calculating,” Vasusena says, because that seems safest. They’re sitting in the Fountain Court of the palace compound hosting the 23rd Hunger Games, his best friend’s baby sister is a cooling corpse in his lap, and two of his competitors are investigating him and the body of a third, the boy from Magadh who killed Dusshala.

“Yes,” the girl says. “Krishna has a plan, he always has a plan, you’ll get used to it. I’m Satyabhama.”

“Karna,” he says. “Vasusena. We’re… I’m from Hastinapura.”

“We know,” says Krishna. “You’re the archer. That’ll come in handy. We mostly have melee fighters. Come on, then.”

He should move. The longer he sits with her the longer it’ll take for Dusshala’s body to be collected, and he can’t keep this grief from her family, when he couldn’t put his body between her and death. But he can’t make himself get up.

Krishna kicks dust over the body of the boy Karna killed and  comes back to sit on his other side. After a while he says, “Satya’s right. I do have a plan, or I will. But we can wait till you’re ready.”

* * *

**Vrishali, widowed**

The sun sinks down on her husband’s death and for Vrishali it never rises again. The sun her father-in-law, violator of frightened young girls; her husband, who killed a boy scant months older than her youngest son; her eldest son hacked limb from limb by her husband’s enemy revealed as his brother; that brother at her door asking to take her son; her son conceived with her husband weeping into her hair for how low he had sunk in his lust for the wife of his enemies; that wife clasping Vrishali’s hands and drawing her close and calling her sister.

There are no kind truths in her life, no bricking them off with walls of love. She keeps hold of Yajnasena’s hands and looks her over. The years have been kind, but they have peeled the humanity from her and left the fire revealed. It is the same for all of them, her and the Pandavas, and Vrishali’s husband who had told her he saw Indraprastha’s Empress clad in a single garment and bleeding in the gaming halls of Hastinapura and wanted to lay his hands on her, his mouth on her: her husband who trembled to touch her with gentle enough hands the first month of their marriage, her husband who she only saw anointed with fragrant oils, her husband who stopped their sons from speaking of violence before her.

To Draupadi, who has fallen silent, she says, “You have no sons left, you and your sister-queens. I have one. Will you take him from me?”

“I will take you from him,” Draupadi replies. “Too long I’ve kept the wives of my husbands from Indraprastha. I will never know the sons I had and lost, because my pride kept me from their cradles; I would like to know their mothers. I would like to know you, sister, away from this kingdom of corpses.”

“I have my kingdom that Suyodhan’s affection won my husband,” Vrishali says. “You may have my son if you choose, or your husband the enemy of mine, if he wants a boy in recompense of his own. I seek no compensation for the eight sons your husbands slaughtered, and I seek no company of yours.”

“I want you in Indraprastha among my kin,” Draupadi tells her, and  _oh_ , Vrishali sees why people go mad for love of her, why they fight wars to avenge insults offered her. Vrishali would love her if she still had a heart, would follow her in court and in battle and into bed.

But she burnt her heart on her husband’s pyre at sunset, and it will never again illuminate her body with love. “I am in Queen in Anga yet,” Vrishali says, “and I am no kin of yours.”  

* * *

**Six Squared Shikhandi**

  * **sins of the father**  
Shikhandi grows up happy, hands always reaching for hands lowered to his, every adult’s favourite, the patrani’s first child, a daughter and then a son.  
Shikhandi stays happy, his gravest sin. Drupad’s actions sit lightly on him, the sorrows of his siblings lighter still. He goes through life serene, his eyes affixed on a goal decided before one body burnt and his atma fled to another, reshaped it to its needs.  
Amba would have cared, wept, screamed, cried havoc. But Shikhandi has the Panchal tendency towards tunnel vision, if he has nothing else, and cares for Drupad’s misdeeds only when they create obstacles in his fated path.  
  

  * **the mother of innovation**  
Prishataa hangs anxious over her child more often than ever she thought she might. The performance will not be repeated with any other children of her husband’s, and Shikhandi will scoff at their claims of negligence, tell them they don’t know a good thing when they have it. Of those later children, even Krishnaa is explicable, Dhrishtadyumna tragic, the others uninteresting to the mind of the Queen of Kampilya.  
But Shikhandi, Shikhandini is a puzzle she hasn’t cracked, a child who refuses to stay where put, demands rights that cannot be awarded, always clamours for more. Shikhandi will go about bare-bodied, Shikhandi will be treated as a man, Shikhandi is nobody’s daughter. Shikhandi, with the oldest eyes in a face still rounded out with childhood, demands the training fit–not for a princess to hold her own till help might come, not even for her brother’s charioteer–but for a maharathi.  
Later Prishataa will tell everyone she felt only pride, but it is in fact with great frustration that she throws Shikhandi into an exercise regimen calculated to keep breasts meagre, courses irregular, bodies indistinct.  
  

  * **(not) one’s brother’s keeper**  
Young, they are the children of some lesser woman, Drupada’s wife only by the patrani’s implacable courtesy, no concern of Kampilya’s Peacock. He notices them, children like yellow flame and blue, dancing in the many courtyards of his father’s Inner Palaces, playing at war, pretending at peace.  
Older, fire-scorched, they are always in his palace, disturbing his rest and haranguing his wife. Every mishap, every cut limb and bruised ego, every minor misunderstanding that involves pushing someone into a fish-pond, every sabotaged dalliance, all of it comes triply to him: the twins offering up their misdeeds, their victims demanding chastisement, his parents assuming punishment has been meted out.  
He would not part with a deed, a word, a thought.  
  

  * **sister(s) under the skin**  
He has been hearing of Krishna’s wives since they met, eighteen and unabashed, Krishna brighter than the sun at midday and darker than the stormclouds hiding it, but it is a hard-won victory, to be kept out of the Inner Palaces of unrelated women, and he makes a point of never going to Mathura, Dwarka, for anything but pleasure.  
So he meets Satyabhama only after his sister’s wedding, in Hastinapura’s Inner Palaces, and has the leisure as he is announced of repenting every decision that kept him for her all these years, decades. Satyabhama for her part puts aside any formal distance, all of the hauteur for which they are both famous, and lets him fold her into his arms and kiss her forehead in bewildered recognition.  
“I could have told you,” Krishna says later. “I am fairly certain I did.”  
  

  * **cry uncle**  
A revelation as the smoke parts and Aswatthama comes into sight with his swords flashing, and Shikhandi moves automatically to meet him: he does not want to die. He is sixty, his clan long-lived, this war done, his destiny fulfilled, his wife, his son, his siblings and their children still miraculously alive. He doesn’t want to die, he wants to know what life might be now the lotuses have withered, now it is only his own arm, his lifetime of skill, meeting an enemy’s sword, an enemy’s might, the shadow of wronged ancestresses gone. He might have a decade to know it, with luck two. There were men fighting, dead, killed by his hand, who were eighty, a hundred, beyond.  
But in the tent behind him, asleep, are his wife, his son, his brother and nephews. Shikhandi steps forth.  
  

  * **country cousin**  
“If you must have a wife,” Drupad says, amused, “we will try my cousin of Dasarna. He has a daughter not too remarkable for her looks, pushing twenty, meek and mild. We will send your sword to her swayamvara, and you only if she agrees.”  
“Shouldn’t we tell her?”  
“No,” Drupad decrees. “He’s family and a vassal. There’ll be no trouble.”  
Later, when anyone asks how he finds it in himself to disagree with his sagacious father, Shikhandi will think of this moment, and shrug.



* * *

**Six Squared Satyavati**

  * **private language**  
It isn’t and then it is, her childhood tongue a secret in the palace barely two days’ ride from it, its mellifluous depth dismissed as puddles for the uncivilised to splash in.   
She teaches her sons, when they are very young, and watches them forget. She teaches them again and Devavrata stops her. These are Hastinapura’s princes, destined for the Elephant Throne and royal deeds, the river’s words are not for them.  
She teaches him instead.  
  

  * **by the numbers**  
They are kinder to her in the palace than she likes, her husband and his ministers and their wives and the courtiers and the courtesans and the maids. They teach her how to walk and talk and move in court and move in bed and she wants nothing,  _nothing_ , as much as she wants to take a scaling knife to them, peel away their urbane smoothness.  
“It is like this,” Devavrata tells her, during a lull on an afternoon when Santanu is sleeping and she is sitting on his throne while Devavrata conducts business in his name. “It doesn’t matter how you act, Mother.”  
“Satyavati,” she tells him. She’s been telling him for weeks. She’s a month younger than him.  
“Mother,” he says. “The technicalities don’t matter. It matters that you know you have the greatest power in this land save my father, and you have power even over him. Know only that.”  
  

  * **the noble art**  
Once, after her husband is dead she watches Bhishma train her sons in the open courtyard between her palace and his. (The boys very nearly live in that courtyard, too young to be in their own palace, too old to be always in hers, too unfitting that they should be in his.) They fight with wooden blades hardly longer than his palm and he pretends they can hurt him with their toys. Once, when she was a girl she watched a lion pretend for his cubs.  
That night her sons find her doors barred against them, and in the morning she gives them over to their brother. It is very little and very cruel, to ask him to rear the sons of the woman who took from him any chance of his own, but he smiles like sunrise over the great bend of the Ganga, and his hands twitch like he wants to dance her into an embrace before he folds them into a pranam.  
  

  * **ghost in the machine**  
She is the little girl learning how to gut fish and how to let the little ones fall back into the water that they might live to grow greater. She is the young maiden saying yes  _yes_   _ **yes**_  to a young rishi, clear-eyed and cold. She is young still and a secret mother, becoming a queen and gutting what might have been a glorious lineage. She is the queen struggling to make sense of politics vaster and meaner than any struggle of fish eats fish. She is a widow and she can see smoke rising over the end of her husband’s life. She is Queen Mother and there is nothing in Hastinapura that she doesn’t know. She is mother to two growing sons, then one, then two again, in an alchemy of loss. She is a grandmother, and the cruelty of bringing them to life is no greater than any other she has performed. She is tired, and she is aging, and she has still more work to do, to let these sons of her blood grow, to let them bring brides into her home, to become a great-grandmother.  
She is Yojanagandha Satyavati, and she is still the daughter her child-starved father chose to leave behind.  
  

  * **the facts of life**    
They are twenty-five, of an age to begin their household, and their lives are over. There will be no other loves, no other pleasures, nothing but the duty towards these younger sons of her body and his father’s love. It is a woman’s lot, after her husband perishes, and she has closed them both into its cage for love of the crown that should have been his wife’s.  
  

  * **history repeats**  
Hastinapura makes widows too soon. Her son’s brides, and now her grandson’s. She has news of it in the forest, her son wandering back from Hastinapura, and for a moment she wants nothing more than to go back to the golden city, and guide Pritha through the labyrinth of these first years without her husband.  
She has had fifteen years without Hastinapura bending her spine, her mind, crooked; her work is done, the line of Chandravanshi Hastinapura secure in the bodies of her hundred and five great-grandsons. Pritha grew up a princess in two palaces, no forlorn girl in a fishing-village. Besides, Devavrat is still there, there forever.  
She walks with Vyasa, not towards the city but the river. She lets his hand slips from hers and walks into the river from which she sprang.



* * *

**Duryodhana does not befriend Karna**

 

  1. “I wish I could have helped,” Duryodhan says, “but nothing would have sufficed, not with their arrogance.”  
It is enough of the truth that Vasusena, deft in spotting lies, lets it go past without comment. His parents are still in Hastinapura, and he cannot take them when he leaves, what use in angering yet more princes?  
But it is enough of a lie that he smilingly brushes off any offers to join the Kuru camp and become its chief bruiser, sniper, assassin-at-large. They can turn to others for that, he is himself interested only in honing his craft. They have interesting weapons in Panchal, and no love for Hastinapura.
  2. When he sees the Kuru princes again, it is at Panchali’s wedding. The Kauravas in splendour among the kings, failing, and among the Brahmins the familiar stillness of the Pandavas, turned ever inward as though they need no company but their own. They look even less like ascetics, priests, than he had done as Parashuram’s disciple.  
Krishnaa smiles at him when he leans into the complex knot of every single surviving child of Drupad’s, hidden behind the doors leading into the Great Hall and evaluating the contestants. Can siblings never go anywhere alone?  
“You’ve spotted them,” Shikhandi says before he can share his news. “Do you think he’ll try his hand at it?”  
“I think he’ll win,” Karna says blandly, and they turn to look at him like a many-hooded serpent, all eleven in perfect accord, unnerving. “Would you let me train your children if I didn’t know my business? There’s nobody else in that hall who could thread that puzzle.”  
“No,” Dhrishtadyumna agrees, laughing. “All of us are here instead, and Shyam is talking politics with our father.”
  3. He is still in Kalinga when he meets Vrishali, one of those chances that seem god-touched. In another day she would have gone to Hastinapura in the Princess Bhanumati’s wake, and he would have returned to Panchala in Shikhandi’s.  
“I would never have known what was missing from my life,” he tells her, too-honest and not enough. What else was missing from his life, perhaps, along with the parents who birthed and abandoned him.  
She laughs at him, unimpressed. “Isn’t it lucky that you’ll know now?”  
Shikhandi is startled and amused by his demands to trail Dhrishtadyumna to Hastinapura, when the night before he had been full of complaints about the Kurus and their overweening arrogance, but willing enough to let him go if he promises to come back with reports about Draupadi’s marital as well as Dhrishtadyumna’s martial progress.  
He returns half-charred from Khandava, for which he blames Shyam, and with a wife, for which he is happy to accept all commendations.
  4. They stay in Kampilya another three years, long enough for Vrishasena to catch hold of his fingers and propel himself in a mad toddle, and then they are on the road again, Drupad’s sons and nephews too grown and his grandchildren too young to have need for an astra-guru. In Vidarbha there are three young princes and a princess who could use his skill, in Matsya a new king looking for a commander, in Dwaraka the searching gaze of the prince he still calls Shyam in Panchalan fashion.  
“Throw a dart,” he tells Vrishali, dawdling in an inn after their first week of travel has brought them to the borders of Panchal. “Or find me a different place.”  
Vrishali kisses him in answer, and does not mention Hastinapura, where his parents still live, where they could find Bhanumati and Krishnaa and still Dhrishtadyumna, where Duryodhan would embrace him and chide him for having wandered so long.  
They let Vrishasena pick, write names on tokens and put them in front of him and stand watching. If they dislike their new home, they can find another in a year or two.
  5.  He never leaves Hastinapura. He barely leaves the Rangabhumi before he is summoned. In a dark corridor beneath the raised dais housing the royal women of Hastinapura he meets his mother for the first time since she abandoned him. Mahishi Pritha, daughter of Kuntibhoj and Surasena, a princess of the Yadavas, and sometime queen of Hastinapura. His mother, his mother, his mother who bore him in pain, in shame, in terror after his father’s assault, who saw no path before her but letting him go, who has looked for her since first she found her husband sympathetic. His mother, who runs trembling hands over his face, his glimmering armour, his earrings. His mother who covers his face in kisses and has his brothers summoned.



* * *

**3 things the Panchal siblings should feel guilty about but don’t**

 

They are all killers. Born to deal death or consecrated for the purpose, firewalkers, bloodspillers. They are the weapons Drupad has spent his life honing, pointed at the throats of Hastinapura and the men who made her great. They know that their father loves them first as the instruments of vengeance, but it is his blood in them, his hands picking them up after every fall, his voice whispering in their ears, his mind moulding them. 

Here is Shikhandi, fine as a god in his armour, wedding the wife his sword won him, without a thought to her dashed dreams. Here he is again, a difficult handful of days later, sending courtesans sated to his father-in-law and shutting himself away with Uma to prove his manhood upon her.

Here is Krishna, named for the way her smile can bring people to their knees, smiling still and refusing the best archer a chance to prove his merit, turning an open competition at her whim into one closed against him for the shadowed birth no act of valour can illuminate in her lotus eyes.

Here is Dhrishtadyumna, thought the quietest of them, the one easiest under the weight of his prophecies, coming quietly up behind an old man who thinks his son is dead, who thinks himself his father’s friend, his teacher. Here he is, taking the venerable head in his hands, and twisting.

* * *

**Krishna and Panchali**

  * _their **first**  impression of each other_  
She’s six when they meet, still one of Drupad’s half-acknowledged children, and he’s run away from his own horror at the birth of his baby sister. She remembers him better than he remembers her: a dark man always at her brother’s elbow, talking, taking away from the few hours Shikhandi finds every week for his crowd of younger siblings. He remembers the girl who snatched the peacock feather from his hair, but only as a blur dancing away across the courtyard, a streak of red like living flame.  
  

  * _the **next**  universe over: an alternative universe where their roles are reversed somehow_  
“And this is the boy who will bring about the death of my brother’s enemies?”  
“There was a prophecy, Samragni.”  
Panchali, who has lived through more prophecies than most sages even hear, smiles her sharpest smile. “Then we’ll just have to nudge it along.”  
  

  * _the **best**  gift one gave the other_  
Each other, and a ferocious love burning through any other entanglements.  
  

  * _the **worst**  memory one has of the other_  
When he finds them, after, in the first days of the Vanavas, she screams at him. That is as things often are between them, as natural as sneaking food from her plate or reassuring her the children are well. But then she weeps in his arms, and he could kill the world to dam her tears.  
  

  * _their **last**  fight/argument/disagreement_  
He thinks she should stop being furious with Arjuna. She thinks masterminding darling innocent Subhadra into marrying her husband was quite enough interference, thank you and good-bye. (None of the arguments about Abhimanyu’s upbringing count, no really, because they’re just offering advice.)



* * *

**Bhishma and Satyavati**

 

  * _their **first**  impression of each other: _  
They don’t get on, circling each other in the public courts with the wariness of cats locked into a room, he trying to reconcile nobility of character with the insecurity of a child too often abandoned, she trying to marry compassion with a need for power and safety. Where Devavrat tries kindness, she snarls, where Satyavati attempts hospitality he finds an insult.  
  

  * _the **next**  universe over: an alternative universe where their roles are reversed somehow:_   
“I came from the river,” the young hunter says, and Princess Yojanagandha, her aunt’s heir, crown princess of Chedi draws back in terror. He is her age, and there had been a boy her aunt had left behind with the fisherman, as too much trouble to raise with her own brother dead.  
But he says, “My mother dallied with the King of Hastinapura, and found him not to her taste.”  
It is no better. He is still in her aunt’s bed, still threatening to fill her lap with daughters with a closer claim to the throne.  
  

  * _the **best**  gift one gave the other_  
His brothers are a gift she gives his father, his kingdom is a gift he gives them. All they have for each other is honesty, sharp as a swift sword and soothing as sandalwood paste.  
  

  * _the **worst**  memory one has of the other_  
On the riverbank after the old king has gone Satyavati sees a boy perhaps a year older than her, perhaps born within days of her first breath. A boy with the river in his eyes, and with her blood singing out to his.  
He folds his hands and bows his head and says, “Mother.”  
  

  * _their **last**  fight/argument/disagreement_  
She goes into the forest with the son who has never brought her to tears since she brought him into the world. She leaves the kingdom, she leaves him holding the pieces of it.  
When he sees Arjuna, ten and tremulous and trying to be brave, he is almost grateful for all the palaces she has left bare in his heart for the boy to romp through.



* * *

**Wizarding World AU for the Queens of Hastinapura**  


The world knows, O King, that the Kings of the Elephant Throne, the Kurus of Hastinapura, boast magic runs in their blood from their progenitors: Budh the hidden son of his mother’s dalliances with the moon, and Ila who was man and woman in one skin. But Kings know they seek brides with magic dancing in their fingers and dazzling their eyes, for where the mother has power, her sons are great in war and counsel and their daughters enchanting prizes and enthralling queens. 

Long ago, King Shantanu wed a goddess of the river and by her had his son made immortal by her blood and his blessing. He married again, a river-witch whose words could charm fish from the water and ministers in court, and the kingdom called her Truth-Sayer, Satyavati.

Satyavati’s elder sons, one a sage from a sage, one a warrior from a king, neither came to the throne, for one roamed the forests ashen-faced and the other strove to claim and keep a gandhara’s name. Her third son, whose weak charms were only ever at work in bed, had two wives who had less power even than him, whose sister had rejected him and instead wed the fire that licked her bones like a lover. 

On these wives Satyavati’s eldest son begat two sons whose magic burned into their skins, blinded and weakened them, made them ill. The younger of these sons wed a woman who could call gods from the skies, a woman who could stop horses in their tracks, who gave him sons like gods pressed into mortal flesh.

The other, blind, wed a woman from the mountains whose sight was turned inwards, who allowed nobody the use of her true name, but was always only Gandhari. With her family killed she fashioned from wax and butter and honeyed words a hundred sons hungry for power, and from her womb a daughter with magic singing through her blood. But her true power lay in prophecy and she kept it from them through fire and flood, war and desperate peace, bound her outward eyes and sealed her truth-saying mouth.

Her daughter grew to womanhood cossetted, brothers to bring her whatever she sought and brothers to confide in, a father absently indulgent, a mother distantly loving, and her brilliant uncle guiding her hand over the dice carved from his father’s bones. But Princess Dusshala loved best the carved pieces of the chess-set, and spent her hours playing both sides of every games, her hands held immobile in her lap, her mind animating ivory and warm wood.

Her eldest son wed a woman gentler than any might have thought he could want, a prize won by his friend’s great valour, Bhanumati, Kalinga’s quietest princess, who made her palace a living garden and spent her hours in the still-room. They say of her in Hastinapura still that she could have stoppered death and bottled fame, but chose to brew medicine for common ills, to win a smile from her brothers-in-law, approval from their mother, Vasusena’s undying trust, and from her husband a love that never faded.

Vasusena Karna early wed a woman with a great love for animals, and an ability to make herself understood: fit Queen for the little kingdom of Anga that loaded timber from its deep forests on the broad backs of its elephants and drove them with vast cattle herds to the sheltering wings of Hastinapura. She gave him nine sons, and three of them bore her name, but none had her power of animagery though they had full measure of her ferocious love for kin.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Arjuna/Draupadi headcanon**

_Their_ _**first** _ _impression of each other_

First impressions don’t last: ‘my archer’ and ‘my princess’ soon give way to complications. What lingers in memory is her hand in his the first time, the irrepressible smiles on their faces, like recognition, like coming home.

 

_the_ _**next** _ _universe over: an alternative universe where their roles are reversed somehow_

“We swore,” says Parshata to his new bride, won by his hand, “that we would do all things together, my brothers and I: fight together, rule together, love together. There are no divisions among us, nothing we do not share.”

 

_the_ _**best** _ _gift one gave the other_

Srutakarma, and the months before his birth. His brothers and Subhadra go into a consulting knot the moment her rage with Arjuna eases, and insist it is his year with her, a blatant gift she cannot turn away.

 

_the_ _**worst** _ _memory one has of the other_

Draupadi falls to the ground and can’t get up again. They watch as she breathes out her last gasping breath. Arjuna palms her eyes shut in their final sleep.

 

_their_ _**last** _ _fight/argument/disagreement_

Every fight after Kurukshetra, thirty-six years of fights, each of them is a blessing, that he lived to argue with her about administration, about the upbringing of grandchildren and nephews and even Babrubahana who still looks at Indraprastha with wary suspicion on his visits. Even the last, about which route to take for the day’s climb.

* * *

 

Panchala Soulmark AU

Shikhandi’s mark says  _my husband_  and Drupada and Prishataa look in resignation and amusement at each other over the infant head of what they had assumed was their eldest daughter.  
“The gods have spoken,” Drupada says.  
Prishataa laughs. “His wife has spoken.”  
Word goes out that Panchal has a third prince, named Shikhandi for the wisps of his hair that curl like a peacock’s feathers, for his mother’s love of the birds, for need of a name for a boy who would always be lovely, for the iridescent blue-green of the words curled feather-like around his right wrist and over his thumb.

Dasharni Uma is quiet through the ceremony that binds them together, quiet as she bids farewell to her parents, quiet as she climbs into the chariot beside him.  
“My husband,” she says to him as the chariots begin to roll away from her home, and his soulmark gleams the gold of a peacock’s sheen at sunset.  
The way she beams and blushes when he draws her in and says, “Beloved,” very nearly compensates for the confusion and fear and pain of the next several days.

* * *

Krishnaa comes out of her mother ringed about with words, thick on her little body, darkening her skin further. As she grows they resolve into five distinct hands, each a different red.  _Beloved_ _Princess Queen Wife Mine._  
When they linger, when she is old enough to see the way she is different, Kampilya hosts Krishna. He becomes a familiar sight, running tame through the palace from council halls to the inner court, sometimes arm-in-arm with Shikhandi but oftener alone, watching the youngest princes and princesses of Panchal with as much and as grave attention as their elders.  
Shikhandi finds him one morning with Krishnaa on his lap, baring her arms for his inspection, bangles stacked on the ground beside them. “You’re the only one I know, who has a similar set of marking,” Shikhandi says, kneeling beside them and moving Krishnaa’s braid to show the boldest written down her spine, where a lover might one day stroke her back.  
“I thought you simply wanted my company,” Krishna teases and then says, “I have many claims on me, many roles, many seats. This is different, I must think on it.”

Perhaps he does: impossible to think of Krishna balking at any task. But Shikhandi has his father’s kingdom to defend, and his little sister to watch step from fire bearing a dynasty’s destruction on her shoulders, and he doesn’t think much of it till he’s standing hidden in the trees watching love turn his sister’s words to gold as five husbands garland and encircle her.

* * *

Dhrishtadyumna’s mark says  _you_  which is very nearly worse, impossible to plan for, impossible to guard against. The Panchalans like to be prepared, Shikhandi tells Uma, gesturing at his body, at his life, at the ever-blooming lotuses fragrant around his throat.  
“Presumably he does something valiant, or scandalous,” Uma says. She is quiet, especially for Kampilya where you have to raise your voice to be heard above the wind, but her anger is like a landslide in spring. “Presumably both, considering this family.”  
Neither mentions, years later when he steps from the consecrating fire, the fate that has latched onto Dhrishtadyumna, the possibility of his victim turning in his hands and exclaiming. It is Panchal, they are princes and princesses; they are all three reeling under the heavy load of murderous destiny. Yet it is love that has left its mark, on Shikhandi, on  Krishnaa. Why ought Dhrishtadyumna be any different, why ought they assume it?

Yet of course, of course, it is Drona on the fifteenth day of the war, Drona who taught him archery in a gesture of affection towards his defeated friend, Drona who gasps and looks around and says “You!” as the sword meets his neck.

* * *

 

 _Realistically, could [ **Duryodhana** ] (in their normal circumstances- i.e. at their own house/battlecamp/spaceship etc.) keep a small child alive for a week if they had to?  A Dog?  A Houseplant? A rock with a  smiley face painted on?  
_Yes. Certainly in Hastinapura, also in a camp as long as said child could open its mouth and ask for food/drink. Almost certainly not in battle.

 _If [ **Krishna** ] had to take the S.A.T. tomorrow with one night to prep, how would they do?  both emotionally and academically.  
_Superbly, going by Sandipani’s gurukul? My Modern AU Shyam does as well academically as he wants, and definitely doesn’t study for it.

 _On a scale of “Complete and Justified nervous breakdown” to “Conquer The Entire Galaxy and become an Immortal God-Emperor”, how well would [ **Kunti** ] handle being abducted by Aliens?  
_Maybe not Immortal God-Emperor but “Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible” sounds about right.

 _What perfectly-normal-to-them-thing does [ **Gandhari** ] do that confuses/pisses off/terrifies their neighbors?  
_Navigates by touching people, not in the normal-to-blind-folk way, but by having a coterie of servants walk just slightly faster than her own pace, so she can be passed from hand to hand to grasping hand.

 _What thing did [ **Vrishali** ]’s parents do that she wishes they had a better explanation for?  
_Marry her to Angraj Vasusena and then refuse to have anything to do with her or her children. It’s not as though she eloped or was abducted. They’re even both suta. Her husband is a delight!

 _How does [ **Karna** ] sabotage themselves?  
_This is more of an essay-type answer, but the short version is that Darcy-like, his good opinion, once lost, can never be regained. He’s not very bog on first impressions and immediate reactions, but when he loves he loves, when he hates he hates, and he is not one to retract loyalty. Basically he’s a Hufflepuff in a world not kind to even the most tooth-gnashing of badgers, and having picked the losing side, he can’t walk away.

 _How does [ **Krishna** ] sabotage themselves?_  
He loves them. He always does, in every life, every turn in the mortal coil, but this time he lets them argue and fight and scold and coddle and claim him. This time he fights for them, he plots for them, he loves them more than he loves what is shiningly right. He is always bright death, the sharpest blade in his own arsenal, but where Parashurama is an axe and Rama a straight sword, Krishna is an Urumi, and he cuts himself as deep as he does his enemies when he fights to protect those he loves.

 _What perfectly-normal-to-them-thing does [ **Krishna** ] do that confuses/pisses off/terrifies their neighbors?  
_He talks to animals, not in the way anyone might to a horse or dog to offer encouragement or admonition. He has conversations with them. (The fact that he can converse with animals is a separate if not remotely unrelated source of terror.)

 _If [ **Bheem** ] had to take the S.A.T. tomorrow with one night to prep, how would they do?  both emotionally and academically._  
Better emotionally than academically, but reasonably well on both counts. 

 _If [ **Subhadra** ] had to take the S.A.T. tomorrow with one night to prep, how would they do?  both emotionally and academically._  
Better academically than emotionally, to the extent that she might mess up answers she knows by dint of nervousness. Not too many, though, this is the girl who adjusted on-the-fly to (a) abduction by famed warrior who happens to be her brother’s BFF, their cousin, and possibly her childhood crush, and subsequently and consequently to (b) noted fit of rage and indignation from famed empress who happens to also be her brother’s BFF, definitely her adolescent idol, and her new co-wife. Girl’s got all that Yadava woman grit and steel.

 _What would cause [ **Krishna** ] to chose to do something petty/pointlessly cruel?  
_It seemed like it would be fun (stealing and holding hostage the clothes of bathing women, stealing butter out of the dairy, heckling his brother and cousins), or it isn’t pointless at all, you’re just gonna have to wait 5-7 years to realise that (…most other things he does).

 _How does [ **Krishnaa** ] sabotage themselves?  
_That temper that must have come from fire, whether she was born in it or simply stepped through it. Krishna is indignantly silent when speaking out might have helped, laughing or vociferous when she might have held her tongue, always ready to flare up in righteous fury. The reason she trusts Bhima most of her husbands, Kunti like a daughter, and Krishna beyond all sense, is that they too understand what it is like to always have a belly full of anger, because they let her rant and rage and embrace her through it, promise her justice and vindication.

* * *

**Pritha isn't adopted**

  1. Surasena cannot part with his eldest son, which everyone understands, but his wife refuses also to part with Pritha.  
“It would be a crime, when she is old enough to see the change and too young to reason it through,” she tells them, as if her arm around the girl is not reason enough to never part with her. “You may have Srutadeva instead, who is just weaned and thinks her wet-nurse more a mother than me.”  
Kuntibhoj, who wants a daughter only to secure succession to her sons, and to secure his own place in heaven, is as happy with an infant as with a child of six. Happier, since he can forget the infant for weeks at a time, and her name entirely, till she is only Kunti.  
  

  2.  The unfortunate Vasudeva’s sister is only too aware of the strange weight of divine boons, and no woman of the Yadavas ever so alone that there are no listening ears and counselling minds to whom she can turn. For Pritha there is an aged father, an anxious mother, and her sister-in-law Rohini, big with child and big with news after visiting her husband in Kamsa’s gilded cage.  
“A son would be useful,” Rohini says. “Especially a son who can grow with only his mother’s clan to turn to, only his uncle’s fate to avenge. If your husband wants him later, he will gain a god-touched prince, valid issue of your maiden womb. If he doesn’t…”  
“We have use for young princes,” Pritha finishes, and Rohini kisses her cheek and smooths the hair back from her brow.  
He grows up in Gokul with his aunt and his cousins, Vasusena, part-named for the uncle he meets only at sixteen with blood on his hands.  
  

  3. But before that, this: a girl of ten, twelve, thirteen unfailingly in Mathura on her brother’s nameday with an armed escort and a basket of fruit, flowers, sweets, yawning delicately and derisively as paranoid jailers shake the basket out.  
“I’m hardly stupid,” she tells Kamsa one year while she’s young enough for youth to excuse impertinence. “Your guards have no reputation for being slack in their duties.”  
Kamsa, who has no siblings and whose cousin is in a prison of his making, asks, “Why do you come every year, then, if not to help him escape?”  
Pritha stares at him as though she cannot abide such stupidity, and in time is allowed her visit, her battered flowers and pulped fruit, the sweets bereft of almond and gold-leaf.  
She takes back every year the name of the dead child, sees to rites for its absent body, its unanchored soul, guides it to safe harbour in the arms of its Yadava kin: Kirttimat and Sushena, Udayin and Bhadrasena, Rijudasa and Bhadradeha.  
  

  4. Vasusena grows up in Gokul without his cousins’ names dinning in his ears, only Balarama and more often Kanha! Kanhaa! Kaanhaa! echoing in the distance as he runs after them, or back to his aunt to explain the newest trouble Kanha has found himself in.  
Not so the Pandavas, who are children and then sturdy young boys who know how cruel the world is to children, how many of their cousins never grew to be two or three or ten, how lucky they are to have the luxury of both parents, the extravagance of three. Pritha dins Krishna’s deeds in their ears, and ensures that they know the shape of true loyalty, love, filial duty.   
In Kurukshetra a hesitant Arjuna says, “I haven’t your courage, to kill my kin without flinching.”  
“I didn’t know him,” Krishna says. “I didn’t love him. O Arjuna, you must do your duty.”  
  

  5. Pritha is not there the day Kamsa dies, or the day her brother steps blinking out in the sunlight after twenty-six years. It takes a month for news of it to reach her, another to marshal a fleet of chariots and an armed escort, cajole and reassure a bewildered Pandu and the children.  
In the third month she steps into the courtyard of what was once Kamsa’s private palace, retracing steps she took as a girl, and is met by two boys of seventeen, bright as twin suns, who prostrate themselves with a rapidity that startles Arjun and frightens three-year-old Nakula into choked, exhausted tears.  
“Aunt,” one says, rising into her embrace.  
The other says, “Mother!” and kisses her hands.



* * *

**Ambika and Ambalika have non-awful lives**

  * Here it is a swayamvara in more than empty name and they garland who they choose, regardless of valour, regardless of wealth. Ambika is happy in Matsya, Ambalika in Chedi. Amba is unhappy with Salva, but even that is her own choice.
  * Here Chitrangad lives and reigns in his own power and exerts it to ensure for his brother a wedding of his own choice, to a princess of the Nasikyas, demure as all her people and devout. The younger princesses of Kashi follow their sister into the swayamvara hall, and walk from it wedded.
  * Here Amba marries early and Ambalika, youngest and indulged, abjures marriage when her heart hangs onto the curve of the smile of the warrior princess of the Rishikas, who leads a string of many hued horses into the stables of Kashi and leaves it with a princess. Hastinapura’s greedy eyes pass unseeing over the lone figure of Ambika.
  * Here Vichitravirya lives, nursed back to anxious health by his Shudrani long after his queens have despaired of him. Furious at what he believes neglect and never even in health the steadiest of men, he orders them banished and has his orders followed before his elders can intervene. When Amba finds her sisters again in Kashi, they are as happy as she remembers them, happier than they have been in years.
  * Here Vyasa is nowhere to be found, ventured further into tangled forest than any courier can track. Bhishma remains steadfast in his vow, and the young prince Bhurisravas who comes from Balhika to rule in his grandfather’s place is polite, and perfectly courteous to his uncle and great-aunt, and to his cousins-in-law the picture of kindness.



* * *

**A Satyabhama/Draupadi AU  
**

  * “Rukmini can manage the household,” her husband says. “It would be a pity if a warrior like you became bound to the duties we expect of women. How strange that we teach all our children all the arts, yet expect men to forget dancing and women the twang of the bow.”  
Satyabhama, some years Krishna’s wife and many years his friend, takes her bow obediently from its oiled leathers, affixes the string to her liking, and sets to regaining calluses she is unhappy to find worn away from disuse. It proves as useful as ever to become an anchor for gossip, to which other news flows: O, the pity of it that the Pandavas are dead two years in Varanavat, O the pair they might have made, Arjuna and Drupad’s fireborn daughter.  
She straddles Krishna when he comes to her bed, and makes a hiding place of her hair, and rides him breathless, and asks, “Is this an apology for Rukmini?”  
He laughs and kisses the divot of her elbows, the raw skin of her right thumb, and in return asks, “Is it not a fitting one?”  
  

  * Of the Kuru contingent only Vasusena—himself clinging to the edges of this gathering of princes—knows her instinctively a contender, of the others nobody. With Krishna beside her she becomes his obedient wife, a docile companion even to such exploits as these; with him absent she changes into a woman whom all eyes may view lightly, though no hands may touch.  
On another day, in another guise, it might have been infuriating, but she is glad in the light leathers of the habitual hunter, her heavy hair gathered away from her face and down her back in a long braid, her ornaments limited to ankle and waist, the single jewelled peacock feather nestled in her hair. Her breasts are bound and her face unpainted: if lecherous glances are still turned towards her it is proof only of the foolishness of men.  
Still, it is a relief to be called away by Shikhandi, who purses his lips and rolls his eyes and asks and asks again whether she acquiesces to Krishna’s newest manipulation of destiny. She ought not be, perhaps, she who has to walk a narrower path than any of the men about her, but her husband has always caught her when she fell, righted her when she stumbled.  
She smiles up at Shikhandi, wicked. “Of course I want to marry the loveliest woman in the world.”  
  

  * She moves fast, down on one knee with the bow in her hands while Drupad’s words are still raising answering whispers among the failed kings and princes, up on her feet again as whispers turn to indignant shouts, ducking behind Krishna as he starts speaking to them.  
Up on her feet and victorious, her arrowhead still embedded in the eye of the fish, the bolt sheared away by encircling blades. Nearly as good as her triumph is the bewilderment of her rivals, who are busily alleging duplicitousness, illusion, even divine intervention as Krishna cajoles and laughs at them.  
O, but how much better the light dawning in the drowning-dark eyes of Drupad’s daughter as she rises from her seat and clambers from the dais, youth clear in her eager gait; how much sweeter than any victory the fragrance of the flowers garlanding them wives.



* * *

**Duryodhana and Karna switch places**

  * Pritha tells Pandu she has a son. She tells him how he was born and why he was abandoned, but Pandu is wild to be a father and does not truly listen. Besides, he was born when a sage came to his mother’s unwilling bed, and he doesn’t like to think about it.
  * The child when he’s found is six, nearly seven, and Kunti and Madri stare as their husband falls completely in love for the first time in his life. Any children they bear for him will always stand in the shadow of the reminder of Kunti’s greatest pain.
  * When jackals howl and vultures scream and donkeys bray to greet his son’s birth, his brother and uncle find it possible to persuade Dhritarashtra of the wisdom of abandoning the child. There is no competing in any case with Pandu’s eldest son.
  * Nobody quite manages, though Yudhishtira is smarter, Sahadeva wiser, Bhima stronger, Nakula better with animals, and Arjuna by far the most patient hunter of them all. Their goodness and his easy acceptance of it only serves to magnify Vrishasena.
  * Pandu still dies with his wife in his arms, but his son is twenty-two, a noted warrior, a steady pupil in matters of kingship, nearly ready to step into the second stage of his life. Nobody blinks when Pitamaha Bhishma has him crowned a few years early.
  * Everyone is shocked when he makes a friend of a boy he meets out hunting in the deep forests of Anga, not because of his generosity–which is lamentably characteristic–but because of how close they cling, like the sun at his zenith and a faithful shadow.



* * *

**Kunti and Yuyutsu meta**

I think Yuyutsu is fascinating as the third generation of the Excluded-from-Succession of the Hastinapur princes, and also as the opposite of the more famous of them in his generation: Vasusena.   
Of course, unlike in the previous generations and due to their laborious planning, Yuyutsu’s generation has any number of acknowledged princes (well, 105 to be precise) and he doesn’t get as much centrality as either his uncle or great-uncle. But he also therefore gets to do his own thing and run away to his cousins when his conscience demands it. Privately I also think he might have been informing on his half-brothers for a while before then.  
  
But in conjunction with Kunti he’s important *because* he’s such a nice foil to Vasusena. It’s interesting that Kunti doesn’t meet him till after Pandu’s death… or, no she can’t, can she, Yuyutsu’s the same age as Yudhishtira, at most. So.  
The thing is, there are any number of ways to have legitimate children in the Mahabharata, and very few to have illegitimate ones. Both parties in a marriage just need to acknowledge a child to make it a child *of* the marriage, whether or not born into it: either party has a child before marriage, either party has a child during it with another partner with spousal consent, either party has a child after the marriage with consent of either their spouse or the spouse’s family, and of course both parties have a child together. Yuyutsu is the second, as are the Pandavas; Dhritarashtra and co are the third; the Kauravas are the fourth. Karna, acknowledged, would have been the first; interestingly, so would Vyasa.  
I strongly believe that Kunti abandons Vasusena because she’s traumatised by the rape and terrified of Kuntibhoja’s reaction. We don’t know, iirc, how pre- or non-marital kids are dealt with in Kuntipuri; nor can I remember instances among the Yadavas at large. But they abound in Hastinapur, and while Vidura’s example she must have known of, I gotta wonder whether seeing Yuyutsu living his life would have made Pritha relent and tell Pandu about her eldest son, or whether–when she saw him as an adolescent after her return to Hastinapur–she was glad nobody had another way to taunt or undermine the Pandavas.

* * *

**Arjuna/Draupadi headcanon**

Well. I’m also not fond of Arjuna and I would lie down and let Our Queen and Empress walk all over me and kiss the ground in gratitude so uh.

I think. Okay, if you’ve seen Brokeback Mountain, I think a bit like that? Not the homophobia obviously, but the way Jack and Ennis are wild for each other but never get to have a steady relationship, so otoh they’re together for twenty years or more, but otoh they’re together for twenty months if that? That kinda thing. Draupadi is of course not married to any of the Pandavas for more than a year sequentially (maaaybe? some versions have her choosing which and when and how long so idk) but she’s still living with them, familiar to them as a sister-in-law when she’s not their wife. They’re family.

With Arjuna… he’s gone in Yudhishtira’s year and then away for twelve. Now, whether this is the first married year (I think) or the sixth (I hope), he’s still missing out on twelve long years of household and pregnancies and kids and just daily life. And she’s missing out on his adventures and hardships at the same time. Then he returns and it’s with Subhadra, who can’t be turned away, and who Draupadi loves in her own right.

But I don’t think it’s the other spouses that are the problem, I think it’s the absence. So maybe they get close in exile in the forest. Arjuna is horrified by the vastraharan, tries to stop it, tries to argue against it, and that’s important. They always were in love, but maybe in the forest they get to be husband and wife for the first time in any consistent way, or at least to be family, to love and show love for each other.

In Matsya in agyatvas of course she goes to Bhima for help, but I think… well, the only other NB person or transperson we meet in the epic is Shikhandi, who is a noted archer but not notably strong, so it might just not have been possible for Arjuna to do what Bhima does with Kichaka, and in any case if you have Bhima around why would you go to someone else for a strength-related task? I’m fond of Brihannala’s presence in Kichakvadh in the B.R. Chopra Mahabharata, where they play drums to drown out the sounds of death. And he comes through at the end of agyatvas, suggesting baby Uttaraa marry Abhimanyu.

So, tldr, I don’t like Arjuna as much I like Bhima, but I cannot doubt that he loved Draupadi fiercely. That she loved him more than her other husbands she proved by her death.

* * *

 

**Kuru princes + Karna + Dushala, what member of the previous generation they’re closest to growing up?**

Duryodhana is closest to his father, something everyone knows and sighs over. Dushshana is his mother’s terrified hope for a second son who might rein in the first. Their uncle Shakuni turns heads and manipulates minds casually for years before settling on Duryodhana as the easiest to wield against the Kuru clan, and the likeliest to wound. But quiet Vikarna sits at Vidura’s feet, and learns.

Karna is his mother’s son, carries her name in his like a banner. He is often among the servants when a child, and too old to not be wary when he comes into the palace as a king by Duryodhana’s whim. But he adores Bhishma, who never notices it or thinks of him as anything but a tool in Duryodhana’s hand.

Dushala is everyone’s darling, the first girl born to Hastinapuri queens in generations, and if her mother is too often busy there’s no dearth of aunts to coddle and advise her. When she marries, a hundred and six brothers accompany her palanquin to the gates of the city, and Duryodhana rides with her all the way to her new home. Yet the morning after, her best comfort is a letter from Pritha, who wed a man who wanted her for the sons she could give him, and earlier swooned in a god’s bed.

* * *

 

**Satyavati Headcanon**

_Headcanon A:  realistic_

Satyavati never falls in love in the way of which the poets sing when they aren’t singing of gods and kings. She beds Parashar for the boon he promises, and marries for love of a queenly crown. But all love brings its own traps, and the crown brings with it the palace, the city, the kingdom and Kuru clan, none of which she planned to love, but to which she devotes her life and shining mind.

_Headcanon B: while it may not be realistic it is hilarious_

Satyavati has no idea what to do with children that demand affection, and is forever peeved that she cannot pawn off this bit of motherhood to an army of dasis. She’d much rather bathe or feed them.

_Headcanon C: heart-crushing and awful, but fun to inflict on friends_

Satyavati hates exile. She has seen her great-grandchild, and it is her time, though it isn’t for Ambika and Ambalika, but she hates it in a way they don’t, with every flutter of her stumbling heart that yearns for Hastinapur. She spent her life clawing her way out of forest mud, and to be sent back in old age when she can no longer resist or stage a return is worse than death. But death comes for her quick and easy, the forest unchanged, the herbs still visible to her dimmed eye. Perhaps her daughters-in-law weep when they find her corpse; she wouldn’t have in their place, but they’ve always been weak.

_Headcanon D: unrealistic, but I will disregard canon about it because I reject canon reality and substitute my own._

Satyavati never remarries, because Bhishma is ponderous about it for reasons beyond lines of inheritance, and because it’s obvious fairly early that her sons couldn’t withstand challengers. But marriage has little enough to do with love, and even less with sex.

* * *

 

**Krishna Headcanon**

_Headcanon A:  realistic_

Krishna always knows everything everyone is planning, thinking, deciding: even before they know it themselves. Only impulsive actions surprise him: Satyabhama picking up a sword to save his life, Rukmini picking up a quill to save her own.

_Headcanon B: while it may not be realistic it is hilarious_

Krishna has spent at least one summer forced to babysit various cousins while meeting the family he never knew he had. It’s an… eventful summer: Sishupal’s extra limbs fall off, Dantavakra tries to bite him, and the Pandavas, well. Yudhishthira is ten and amusingly sombre, Bhima is a flailing nightmare who thankfully fixates on Balarama, and Arjuna at six, skimming stones into the river, is so set on his task that he later claims he only met Krishna at Panchal.

_Headcanon C: heart-crushing and awful, but fun to inflict on friends_

Krishna is sixteen when he kills Kamsa. He has been having an illicit affair with a woman he should be calling aunt but has been calling beloved, for at least a year prior. Radha is in love with him, but Radha is also between a decade and fifteen years older than him. It may add to his mystique among his friends, but Krishna is fifteen and nobody in his family knows he’s sneaking away at night to have sex with a grown woman.

_Headcanon D: unrealistic, but I will disregard canon about it because I reject canon reality and substitute my own._

Krishna is the Cool Older Cousin to every royal he meets at a formative age, including the ones who eventually end up on Jatrasandha’s side. Panchali adores him, most of the younger Panchala princes and all of the Pandavas worship the ground he treads, surely his own nephews should like him at least as much as their parents? Abhimanyu does, but Abhimanyu is an infant. Prativindhya and Satanika, however, refuse to go to Dwaraka with him, and instead journey to Kampilya with their younger brothers, even Srutakarma, which he feels is unfair.

* * *

 

**Draupadi/Yudhishtira meta**

I didn’t start out liking Yudhishtira; he’s difficult for kids to like, I think, because when you’re that age everything seems very clear-cut–right and wrong–and people who find their way to truth through a moral tangle seems very boring and–dare I say it–cowardly. The childhood favourites are Bhima or Arjuna: big roaring principled heroes, whose victories you can point to without thinking too much about it. Plus, I have always worshipped Draupadi, and I never thought he was good enough for her. He didn’t win her, and then he betrayed her. My favourite bits of the B.R. Chopra show were when she shouted him down, often the one person who didn’t treat him with deference. I loved it, I lapped it up.

As late as 2013 I was still writing fic that pretty obviously show my distaste for Yudhishtira. It took another year or two, and some much-belated growing-up for me to start appreciating the difficult, impossible situations in which Yudhishtira finds himself: a quiet man who wants nothing so much as to live in the sylvan, solemn company of sages, but must constantly strive to save not just his birthright or that of his brothers, but often their very lives. And it’s only in learning to love Yudhishtira that I’ve come to understand his marriage to Draupadi, which had always seemed absolutely incongruous in the past. Bhima/Draupadi I understood: two passionate people, always a little excessive; Draupadi/Arjuna was obviously romance and angst; even with the twins I figured a friends-with-benefits kind of marriage.

Draupadi and Yudhishtira are obviously a political match, but they’re also an intellectual match, something that is rare for both of them. She’s more practical than him, but Pandita Panchali can sit and talk neeti-sastra with him in a way his brothers aren’t interested in, that we know of. And that’s important  **because**  theirs is a political marriage, in the sense that it comes with a job offer: Draupadi is still Empress of Indraprastha when she’s not in Yudhishtira’s bed, even though none of her other husbands are ever the Emperor. Theirs is a marriage of two minds (obligatory Shakespeare mangling) and the years of peace and prosperity at Indraprastha are born of that marriage as much as Prativindhya, who grows with his civic twin. I know one of the reasons I never got interested in them as a couple was that these years are either elided in most adaptations, or we dwell on Arjuna’s Astonishing Adventures instead. And those are more interesting, and have their own narratival function, certainly, but Yudhishtira and Yajnaseni sit in Indraprastha and build it up, this upstart little kingdom they’ve hacked out of a forest, into an empire that rivals Magadh and threatens Hastinapura in terms of territory and wealth, certainly, but that’s brought in by Bhimarjuna ahead of the Rajasuya Yajna. The reputation that makes it such a good place in which to live, that brings people in from all across the country who haven’t had good lives where they started out, who seek refuge and protection, that’s down to Yudhishtira as Dharmaraja and Yajnaseni as Grihalakshmi.

So far, so domestic. They have the Rajasuya Yajna, and they’re at the top of their game, feted by friends and family, kids growing up, everything amazing. Then they go to Hastinapura and Yudhishtira fucks up. If you’ve lived with an addict who seems to have himself under control, and then suddenly spins out into a tire-fire and you’re dragged along helpless and terrified… yeah. We get the [What the Hell, Hero?](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ftvtropes.org%2Fpmwiki%2Fpmwiki.php%2FMain%2FWhatTheHellHero&t=YWYxOWIzOTgxNWQyM2ZiZjhhYjNkYjczMGVkZDcxZDIzNzY0N2NiYyx3cVdwa0hlMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3Av5kJ3PJv5kNvEjm0U0WdVQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwalburgablack.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F182841795059%2Fhindu-mythology-couples-celebration-week-draupadi&m=1) speeches after they’re in the forest, in exile,  ~~my favourite part of this marriage as a kid, because Draupadi calling people out on their bullshit was incredibly empowering for me as a girlchild who everyone told she was too shouty and judgy, but anyway~~. I’m not sure how Yudhishtira fixes this, but presumably he does, and I’m 99% sure he’s the one who has to, because Draupadi is very justifiably set on being Forever Furious about this. Even discounting Suthanu (though it’s interesting to me that she only has second children with Yudhishtira and Arjuna) as quasi-canonical, we get the episode of the Saugandhika, the golden lotus, which Draupadi decides to give Yudhishtira. The association of lotuses and mythical heroines and goddesses is of course a pronounced factor, and Draupadi is herself associated with blue lotuses, but it is a gift of great value, as evidenced by Bhima’s subsequent adventures in trying to acquire another. Admittedly I also love this episode as one of the moments when you get to see the polyamorous family in practice, because she takes the gift Bhima brings her and passes it on to Yudhishtira, and then asks Bhima to get her another, and this is regarded as very normal in kind if not scale. By the time they get to Matsya, they’ve reached an understanding, and we actually get one of my favourite speeches about Draupadi when they’re discussing disguises.

Yudhishthira said, “This is our beloved wife dearer to us than our lives. Verily, she deserveth to be cherished by us like a mother, and regarded like an elder sister. Unacquainted as she is with any kind of womanly work, what office will Krishna, the daughter of Drupada, perform?”

Some of it is a bit… odd, but it illuminates the way Yudhishtira regards her when he’s not around any of the things to which he’s addicted. A wife is your mother, sister, friend, disciple, colleague, all in one, and Draupadi–because she’s his co-ruler even when she’s not actively his wife–is definitely all these and more. (I also have feelings about Yudhishtira who is used to riding herd over a bunch of rowdy young men reacting to this fiery girl he’s suddenly married to, but this is already an essay.) I also enjoy that he thinks Draupadi–a noted cook–is unacquainted with womanly work, because that’s not what he sees of her. I’m sure Bhima knows exactly what domestic skills Draupadi has, but to Yudhishtira she’s a fellow scholar (also I think this contradicts episodes of him helping her care for the Brahmins while they’re in exile, but eh). This is not always a good thing, because–though he speaks a good game about how delicate and sheltered she is–Yudhishtira’s expectations about Draupadi’s ability to get herself out of trouble are (while kinda justified) not always in line with reality, as we see in Matsya, where he reacts poorly when she runs into court chased by Kichaka. Yudhishtira never does feel himself physically capable, and actively needs to be sheltered by his brothers. That Draupadi gets past this to cup Yudhishtira’s blood when Virata hits him is pretty remarkable  ~~and as a kid I was super unsure why she was helping him at all buuut anyway~~. Then there’s the stunning reveal of the Pandavas, with Yudhishtira enthroned, flanked by his brothers, and with Draupadi on his lap. Emperor and Empress, forever.

But also the marriage changes, or it exhibits its symbolic aspects more fully in the Kurukshetra period, as it has to. Both of them are not just multifaceted as people, but in their significances. He’s the mortal iteration of Dharma, who is also Yama; she is sprung from fire and while she  **has**  been nurturing her chief work is of destruction. So they end up, Emperor and Empress, probably with more territory than fifteen years ago, and a violently depopulated people. His cousins are dead, her brothers are dead, her sons are dead, their daughter is married off, their one grandchild isn’t actually theirs, and they’re stuck taking care of people who have every reason to hate them. Because their name is Death and Destruction, and they rule a land of wailing. 

I love it, I love it so much. I’m sorry, this isn’t a happy note to end on, so, uh. I also think they have a surprisingly robust sex life that is drowned in the same labyrinthine philosophical argumentation that characterises every other part of their lives. I think Yudhishtira grovels for years during Vanavas (as he should) and never quite realises that it’s the way he’s helping in their daily life that reconciles Draupadi to their ongoing marriage. I think that the happiest day of his life is when Suthanu is born, because she’s a sign of renewed hope for him, a child he can be good to and for. I think Yudhishtira and Draupadi are–through their decades of being family–always surprised by overt signs of mutual affection because she thinks he’s too intellectual to have human emotions and he thinks she’s too in love with the others.

* * *

 

**Satyavati only has daughters**

  * It takes only a year after the second child is born, for one of his father’s ministers to corner Devavrata and call him by the name he has decreed forgotten.  
“The queen is young,” Bhishma tells him before the spiel can devolve too much. “And my father is…”  
His father is of an age to have entered Banaprastha, but has anchored himself in Garhasta with aid of a lissome bride; obliged his son to live out an unnatural life in Brahmacharya. The words die in his mouth, and Minister Subhanu, who has known him since he first dripped river water into Hastinapura’s marble halls thirteen years ago, sighs and pats his hand.  
“At least you vowed only to step down for any sons they might have.”  
  
Chitra and Vichitra are twelve and ten when their father dies, and Satyavati the most relentless in pushing Devavrata to the throne.  
His coronation is the first time in fourteen years that he sees his betrothed: thirty now, and still with the same smile, and still, impossibly, smiling at him.  
  

  * The waters of the river rise as he swings off his horse and steps onto the bank, and his mother meets him, wrathful, halfway down the strand of pebbles smoothed in her waves.  
“I left you in his care because he wanted an heir,” she seethes. “How dare he betray us?”  
“I will hear no ill of him,” he tells her. “Not today when I have come from his pyre to bring you his ashes.”  
“You spent too long with sages,” Ganga tells him, but takes the bundle of ashes in their unbleached wrapping, and sets it afloat without further complaint.  
“I spent too little time among women,” he agrees, and sighs. “I know nothing of how to raise princesses, and they are too young to begin their training in arms.”  
“If that is all you think women are fit for, you should leave them to their mother,” his mother advises, and laughs like a brook babbling in the high mountains.  
“I cannot,” he tells her. “Queen Satyavati finds them a burden she is unwilling to bear. She bore a son for Rishi Parasara seven years ago, and now goes to find them.”  
“Santanu had brothers,” Ganga says after a time, quite as though she is unsure of it.  
“Two,” Devavrata says. “My uncle will attend my coronation with my aunt and cousins. Perhaps they will have an answer for my troubles.”  
  

  * Vichitra is fourteen when she becomes an aunt, and her sister-in-law laughs at her eagerness to hold the little prince and pelt his nurse with questions.  
“We need to find you a husband soon,” she says, and Vichitra blushes but nods.  
It is no easy matter to have a princess married, especially one with an elder sister who shows no interest in the matter and instead notches another arrow on the bowstring and frowns when she falls short of the mark.  
“I will not force them to it,” King Devavrata says. “I have had years to think of how ill it would have been, had I married you with my head full of duty and your heart full of love. If Chitra grows to want a husband later, no man fit for her will balk at taking a grown woman into his home. If she loves… if she never loves a man more than her weapons, or…”  
“Then she will be her nephew’s most stalwart defender,” Kashi agrees, “as you are hers. But what of Vichitra?”  
“We will send her in a year to visit our cousin Somdatta in Bahlika, and see whether she can grow to love any of his kin; in another year, to your kin the Yadavas to see if she might not make a good bride for Shurasena or Kuntibhoja. Agreed?”  
  

  * Chitra takes Somakirti out hunting one spring when the young prince is thirteen and chafing at forever being in the company of his father. Her company comes hurtling back in a week’s time, riding horses frothing at the mouth and gone wild with fear, Somakirti tied to the saddle of the lead hunter.   
Devadhwaja, forty years old and twenty in the king’s service, hands him his son and sinks into deep obeisance, all limbs still trembling.  
“He took my aunt,” Somakirti says, thrashing against his bonds in his father’s arms, “The Gandharva king, he took her for his bride because their names matched, and it pleased him. We have to go back, we have to go now!”  
  
They go back. They spend a month looking for Chitrangadaa, six petitioning their kin and allies, a year sending messages to the Gandharva court on the Ganga’s divine waves.  
In three years time a toddler appears briefly in the spot where she was taken. “I am Sthuna,” he tells Prince Somakirti, “eldest son of Chitrangad and Chitrangadaa.”  
He melts out of Somakirti’s grasping hands, and only returns to the mortal realm once more, decades later in the forests of Panchala.  
  

  * Prince Somakirti himself never ascends the throne, dying a gallant death with his Bahliki cousins in his uncle Somdatta’s fight with the Prince Sini over the hand of Devaki, mother of heroes.  
Princess Vichitra comes home the first time in a decade, to see to the last rites of the nephew to whom she fed the first grain of rice. She comes in white, her husband among the dead, and she brings her brother her own children.  
“They have enough princes in Bahlika,” she tells Devavrata, “and such grief as will not make way for children mourning their parents.”  
“You mean to follow him,” Devavrata says, but he knows before she answers that in this Vichitra is like the mother she scarcely remembers, that she can neither bear to live a life that has disappointed her, nor to choose death.  
“I have a brother who is a great sage,” she tells him. “I met him once when I had my eldest; I go to him to learn what I can of patience.”  
She steals away in the night without a word to her sons, and in the morning Devavrata finds them wandering desolate in the gardens and trying to climb the walls and go out in the city to be with their mother.  
“They will be great rulers,” Kashi reassures her husband, taking the boys by hand and leading them into the Inner Courts of the Hastinapuri palace. “Dhritarasthra and Pandu, we will raise them as our own.”



* * *

 

**Madri never marries Pandu**

  * Madri refuses. Her father was a mere princeling when Bhishma abducted Salwa’s betrothed and spat her back, and they learnt a different lesson from it in Madra than in Salwa. In Madra women learn to fight just as well as men, and in Madra women carry a thin sharp blade strapped between their breasts to slit unwary throats. There is no trusting Hastinapuris, who think their own oaths supreme, and there is no honour in surrender to a kingdom that starves its allies into submission.  
Madri stands on the battlefield, defeated and defiant, and tells Pandu she would rather kill him or kill herself before she marries him. Shalya flinches and folds his hands together, begging; he has a reputation for mercy, young King Pandu, but he has slaughtered his way across the battlefields of the Yamuna.  
You wouldn’t know it from his smile, sunny and self-deprecating, but Madri met Bhishma once, in the Kamyaka woods with a slain deer upon his knees. He had had the loveliest smile Madri has ever seen.  
  

  * Pandu comes home to a wife as distant as she had been loving when he left. It is the first disapproval he has ever faced and bewilderingly compounded by his mothers, who turn their faces from him and speak to him as to some visiting prince upon whom they cannot declare war. The court fetes him, and his uncle and brothers cover him with glory, and even Grandmother unbends enough to admit he has done well. But not his wife, and not his mothers.  
A week lapses before Ambika summons him, and he goes to her fleet-foot and fearful, and she tells him the story of her wedding, the princesses screaming, the iron arm of the warrior carrying them away from home, the gallant princes pursuing and failing.  
“Our sister died because nobody listened to her refusals in time,” Ambika says in the end. “And we have lived all your life in a home that houses her murderer. I am relieved that you listened to your princess when she refused you, but we had hoped to have raised you kinder.”  
Ambalika does not meet him that day, and not for a month of days he spends alone but for Dhritarashtra who wants to know every detail of the battle, how he had bested Shalya, how the princess had trembled before him.  
  

  * He pulls Pritha into his lap and kisses her petal-fine fingers, her storm-dark hair, the lids of her doe-large eyes, and tries to forget the defiant brow, the glaring eyes, the scornful mouth of the Princess Madri, Shalya’s sister.  
When he falters and his hands fall slack from her waist, Pritha tips his chin up and says, “I would write to her if she would not reject it. I shall write to her regardless, and we will see what comes of it.”  
Pandu turns paler than his name, already dreading her plans, already wary of his brilliant Yadava wife. “To matchmake a wedding for your husband,” he teases, and knows as he says it that the words emerge trembling.  
“To ask her where she found the courage, to refuse you gleaming gold and victorious, with her brother’s life between your hands. If I had had it, when I was a girl, if I had been brave…”  
Pandu shrugs free of her hold and draws her down closer again, holds her head against his shoulder. “You will tell me when in your life you have needed valour,” he says while she shakes. “And I will tell you then as I tell you now, Princess, you have valour of a quality rare in the world.”  
  

  * Pandu lives. That’s what it comes down to, in the end, as though it is woman’s work to save a man from his own lust before she saves herself. Pandu lives, and when his eldest son is twenty-five and ready to embark on the second stage of his life, he goes home to Hastinapuri and takes a seat on the King’s Council with his uncle and great-uncle and offers advice till he is grey himself, an aging man serving an old man still clinging to power. Dhritarashtra never surrenders the throne, and outlives his brothers, sons, nephews.   
Hastinapur is never great, but it is steady; the North Star glimmering true in the stormy skies of the Yadavas clashing with Magadha. If Pandu’s younger sons ride out with the Yadavas, that is only to be expected of men who grew to adulthood with their mother’s family, who learnt from their cousins how to lead without coveting the crown or needing it.  
  

  * But here’s the thing. Madri lives, too, and lives well, her brother’s charioteer and in time her husband’s. She has daughters who shine flame-bright, sons who prize their sisters’ valour as high as their wisdom, and with her own hands helps steady theirs on the reins of their first horses, the strings of their first bows, the hafts of their first spears.  
She watches Hastinapur and Magadh spread their spheres of influence, bring all the arashtra lands under their control, bully and bribe and suborn chieftains and tribeswomen; her husband heeds her warning and strengthens alliances among his kinsmen, facilitates weddings and fosterings, urges peace instead of internecine raids.  
Madri is sixty when the Pandava army comes to her door, led by a storm-dark man who might in some other life have called her mother, and she meets him with her hand steady on her nocked bow. He has his father’s bearing, and his father’s smile, and there is nothing in him that reminds her of Pandu the young king, met by chance on a battlefield forty years ago.



* * *

 

Dating Pros and Cons

**Draupadi**

_**Pros** _

  * Stunning. Just. Canonically the perfect woman.
  * Brilliant, because you don’t get that Pandita tag out of nowhere.
  * An amazing cook.



_**Cons** _

  * uh. Definitely has a temper, but not really without reason, so don’t be an asshole and you’ll be fine.



 

**Dhrishtadyumna**

**_Pros_ **

  * So this is shallow, but I feel like he’d be good at taking orders *and* taking care of people, which is a rare combination.
  * Handsome af, because c’mon, all of them are.
  * Smart enough to be devious, sweet enough to not use it all the time.



_**Cons** _

  * Driven af, so you might not see him that often
  * Dude’s got, uh, 10 brothers, so best of luck coping with that many people
  * Related, you’re not always gonna be top priority.



 

**Shikhandi**

_**Pros** _

  * So this applies pretty much across the board, but that archery skill is likely to translate pretty well elsewhere. And Shikhandi canonically has mad skills in bed, accd. to the courtesans his father-in-law sends to, uh, check.
  * Devoted to his loved ones.
  * I can’t remember whether Shikhandi canonically has a kid, but he helps raise the Upapandavas, and poss. his Panchala nephews so that should bode well.



_**Cons** _

  * This also applies across the board, but Shikhandi has A Destiny around his neck since he was very young, and that’s likely to be difficult to deal with.
  * I… okay so I have complicated feelings about having to reveal your trans status to partners v. women being married essentially under false pretexts and unable to leave their spouses afterwards, but. Dude’s not as truthful as he should be.



Also also, in case this needs to be said, they’re all ruthless, they’re all intensely political, they’re all gonna bat for each other and their dad no questions asked.

**Subhadra**

_**Pros** _

  * The most sunshine girl in the world.
  * Only “smarter than you’d think” if you’re caught up in appearances, but yeah, very very smart.
  * Knows what she wants, and if you’re very lucky, what she wants is you.



**_Cons_ **

  * Exceedingly charming and persuasive.
  * Comes with one stubborn and one manipulative brother, both over-protective.



 

**Krishna**

_**Pros** _

  * Canonically the best of lovers, spouses and friends.
  * Wonderfully lacking in gender bias, even considering his world is nicer to women than might be assumed.
  * Quasi-canonically queer.



_**Cons** _

  * Canonically a master-manipulator.
  * Multiply married and partnered, so, uh, monogamy is very much not on the cards. (Obvs not a con if you’re poly.)
  * Your life is gonna be Very Political.



 

**Balarama**

_**Pros** _

  * Very loyal.
  * Very brave.
  * Not very inclined to meddle in the affairs of others.



**_Cons_**.

  * Alcoholic.
  * Stubborn af.
  * That loyalty leads to questionable things.



* * *

 

**Draupadi/Yudhishtira HP AU**

They don’t meet in school. He’s six years older and in a different House besides. They hear a lot about each other, as she pals around with Sahadeva in Divination, and irritates and impresses Arjuna with her DADA skills.

Instead they meet years later, when he’s an Unspeakable and she’s… well, officially she’s a part-owner and  _chef de cuisine_  in the classy new restaurant in Sosi Alley that Bhima can’t stop raving about. Yudhishtir is just a little startled by how quickly and easily she becomes the person dragging him to Quidditch games (even when Nakula isn’t playing), making him try out new ice-cream flavours and every last bean in a Bertie Bott’s bag, even haranguing him into letting Arjuna and Nakula take him flying.

He’s even more surprised to find himself in love.

* * *

 

**Pritha & Vasudeva; lies**

The Yadavas come to Indraprastha and Kunti’s sons watch their solemn mother turn into a sobbing girl caught up in her brother’s arms.

“You lived,” she says. “You lived, you lived, you survived him.”

When she was young, he had gone to his second wedding and never returned. She’d waited for months to see him, to tell him to take her away from Kuntibhoj’s home that felt more a dungeon than a palace, and had heard instead that he’d been relegated to one in truth before the flowers on his wedding garlands had wilted.

The next morning she had become a Yadava again in Kuntibhoj’s eyes, spent the following years under his suspicious eye, always afraid to emulate the brother who had been her hero growing up. She had been five when she’d left home, ten when he’d been imprisoned, fifteen when fear drove her to extremity.

Her eldest son is thirty, his youngest thirty-five, and his hands on her hair are gnarled and steady, and his haunted eyes still hold their familiar twinkle.

“So have you,” he tells her, hoarse and smiling. “Pritha, my princess, my little one. You’ve survived.”

 

The first lie is this.

“You will be happy,” Vasudeva tells his little sister while her clothes and toys are packed in cedar chests and their mother retreats to the temple, their father to his council halls.

“I will not,” says Pritha, who is not yet of an age to dissemble. “Was I bad? Why are they sending me… I’ll be good, I’ll be good, don’t let them take me.”

“You’ll be happy,” Vasudeva insists. “King Kuntibhoj is a friend of Father’s, and he wants a child, he’ll take care of you, and you’ll have fun with him.”

“I won’t have Mother or you.”

“I’ll visit. Every year, we’ll all visit.” This is the second lie, but he doesn’t know it yet.

 

Pritha’s first lie sets a pattern for her.

“But he’s not my brother any longer,” she says on the fifth day after news has reached of Vasudeva’s disastrous wedding. Five days of being mocked and taunted and reminded of the failures of her family. “Is he not?” asks Kuntibhoj, cruelly amused, stopping in mid-tirade. “You have his blood, you have his follies. He was so weak a friend won him his bride, and so foolish he followed her into a dungeon.”

“How could I be his sister when the wise and valiant King Kuntibhoj is my father?” Pritha asks carefully. She has spent two nights in terrified weeping over her brother’s fate, but she cannot bear to let it show.

“Will you be as wise, little daughter?”

“How can poor Kunti not glean her father’s virtues?”

 

In his cell, Vasudeva loses count of his lies: to Devaki, to Rohini on her rare visits, to Kamsa, to himself.

 

In Kuntirashtra, Pritha comes home with the river’s salt and mud on her feet and tells herself she will lie only to keep her children safe, and not count the cost.

* * *

 

Yudhishtira and Arjuna switch places

  * “First ask Indra,” Pandu says, “for my eldest son who will be King hereafter.”  
It is no easy thing, to please the King of Gods, but three years of devotion from Pandu, and a year of anxious waiting, and then a night of labour, bring forth a boy dark as the thunder-clouds that gathered when he was birthed, with a lightning-bright smile.  
“Now a son strong as my brother, to serve and protect his sibling,” demands Pandu the insatiable, and in another year, after Bhima has cracked the earth with the moment of his arrival, “and now one who will be steady when his brothers are not, a wise counsellor to guide him.”  
Yudhishtira is always small for his age, always quiet, and Pritha too stills her tongue and watches Madri bring forth twin sons to command the Hastinapuri army.  
“He’s recreating his family,” Madri says, when the twins are three and Arjuna an obstreperous seven.  
“We’d better go meet his family,” Kunti says, and because her word is law, and because Arjuna is desperate to meet his glorious great-uncle, they go home.  
  

  * Yudhishtira’s arrow twangs into the bird’s eye, and Guru Drona, frowning, asks, “What did you see?”  
“I saw the bird, and the branch, and the tree, and my brothers, and my cousins, and my Guru, and the eaves of the forest,” Yudhishtira says. “I saw the world, and everything in its place.”  
Drona nods, and remains silent long enough that the more restive princes start fidgeting, and even the usually placid Yudhishtira frowns.  
“Ought I not have?”  
“No,” says Drona. “Every archer has his own way; so long as your arrows find what they seek, I cannot fault your way of looking at the world.”  
  

  * “Mother,” Yudhishtira calls, “look what bride our brother has won himself with his feat of arms.”  
Kunti comes forth harried, unhappy, worrying already that Arjuna has won himself a wife such as Bhima did and–kindhearted–will be unable to leave her behind when their lives alter again.  
Instead there is a royal bride, robed in red and drenched in gold, waiting outside her door, her sons clustered behind her smiling, and at Arjuna’s side a dark boy with a look of her brother.  
“Be welcome in my home,” Kunti says to the girl, worrying already. “Bring forth heroes.”  
“If I do as you have done, mother,” she says, “I shall count myself blessed.”  
The strange, too-familiar boy laughs. “You are quick to count your blessings, Panchali; great have been the travails of my aunt.”  
“Great have been her blessings,” Panchali–Drupada’s daughter? Have her sons lost their heads for beauty?–retorts with the ease of old friendship.  
Arjuna smiles and smiles and smiles, the cares stooping his great shoulders forgotten, as though these glorious strangers have turned him into the carefree boy she now scarcely remembers.  
  

  * “I have no heart for gambling,” Arjuna says, “but if you will let me have my choice of mounts and lend me a cadre of cousins to go hunting, I will let you rob Yudhishtira blind.”  
Laughter rolls through the assembly, even Yudhishtira grinning shame-faced. “I was a boy when last I played against King Shakuni.”  
“You were twenty-four, and he won the clothes of your back,” Duhsaha jeers, but affectionately enough.  
“You played Prince Vasudeva last year and only escaped because he was kind,” Devika reminds him. “I’ll inform the Empress to keep wine on-hand to comfort you in your loss.”  
“Even my wife betrays me,” Yudhishtira laments, and Bhima pats him on the shoulder.  
“Be of good cheer,” Arjuna says, “we’ll bring you back a tiger-pelt to wager if you last so long.”



* * *

 

**Pritha & Vasudeva switch places**

  * As a sign of his great devotion to his cousin, King Shurasena offers his son up for fostering, and keeps his daughters at home.  
“We will soon have another,” he tells his wife, with confidence ill-befitting a man with three daughters, “and he needs an heir to keep him from Puta.”  
There is no son, and though many sages are propitiated, Queen Bhojya keeps her children far from great responsibilities. Nor is there a marriage to a Hastinapuri prince for Pritha, nor does Sini win the princess of Mathura for his princely friend.   
  

  * “If you were any other woman, I would keep you in seclusion and be done,” Kunti’s husband tells her with every appearance of affection, “but with your way with the gods, that’s no security.”  
“Why would I birth sons who would kill their father?”  
“It is in the hands of the gods,” Kamsa says, and laughs.  
Kunti calls for them quick as she can, watches the light dim from their eyes as she presses the breath from their bodies, and in the eighth year calls upon Vishnu the preserver to deliver her from her plight.  
  

  * “The gods are pleased with your devotion,” Vasudeva’s younger son tells him on an evening in the first year of his freedom when the skies are heavy with thunderclouds. “You will find five sons in the temples of their fathers, should you choose to pray for them.”  
“And if I do not?” Vasudeva ventures, because these sons of his body are unfamiliar and terrifying enough, and he is too old and Devaki and Rohini too exhausted to be about the business of parenting infants.  
Krishna whistles a jaunty tune, as note-perfect without his flute as with it at his lips. “Then there will be five godly boys abandoned in the temples of their fathers; surely they would make better allies than enemies?”  
  

  * “Whatever it is,” Vasudeva calls out, “divide amongst yourselves and quit bothering me.”  
The laughter ceases, and into the hush, Satrajit’s daughter says, “My lord, perhaps you might want to look at our new acquisition before you scatter it like largesse to the priests.”   
When he emerges from his chambers, Krishna, Satyaki and Satyabhama are clustered around a richly-dressed young girl whose clothing bears the Vaidarbhi swans.   
“Have you brought trouble to my door again,” Vasudeva asks, mostly to see their confirming nods. “No matter. Princess, we will give you a better taste of Vrishni hospitality than has fallen to your share.”



 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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